


Strange Skies

by Mercurie



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Culture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anti-Hero, Bugs & Insects, Cyborgs, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Horror, IN SPACE!, Magic and Science, Science Fiction, Survival, Weirdness, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-10
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2018-04-19 06:55:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4736924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercurie/pseuds/Mercurie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane Foster falls into the void with Loki. On the far side of the galaxy, they find alien civilizations in turmoil, a new power rising, and no one to rely on except each other.</p><p>ON HIATUS: http://innermostplanet.tumblr.com/post/131111061187/on-hiatus</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Impact

**Author's Note:**

> This story picks up at the end of Thor 1 with the fall from the bridge and will finish just before Avengers with the opening of the Tesseract. It imagines what might have happened during Loki's gap year if he'd had Jane Foster with him.
> 
> I'll put content notes at the end of each chapter where necessary, so click to the end if you want to see them before reading. Blanket warning for giant insects and arachnids.
> 
> Tags/rating/other info are provisional and may change as I go along. I'm not entirely sure how shippy this will get, but I'm tagging / instead of & for now.

Jane's consciousness skipped like a broken record. An instant of darkness.

A cold and solid weight slammed into her. She tumbled end over end, fighting for breath. The battle went on for a long time. She could think of nothing except that her lungs were filled with fire instead of air. Breathe, she needed to breathe. Her throat worked, choked, failed to suck in oxygen. Grit stung her eyes. 

After one final violent struggle, her lungs relented and she drank in a breath, heaving and coughing. Another. Nothing felt as good as breathing. She blinked away the grit. 

Dirt. Gray dirt. She was lying on her side staring at a patch of lifeless rock and dust. It was dark. She hurt everywhere, but she was alive. The new struggle was to remember where she was and what the hell was going on. 

She was Jane Foster, currently based in Puente Antiguo, New Mexico, and she'd been studying the Einstein-Rosen bridge. 

She lay still, taking deep, slow breaths. She remembered a bridge, all right. Not an Einstein-Rosen bridge, but a rainbow bridge. In Asgard. Thor had broken the rainbow bridge with his hammer. She remembered running on the rainbow bridge with nothing but ocean beneath her and, at the far edge, space; she remembered screaming _Thor_ and the first cracks zig-zagging under her feet. If he broke the bridge, she wouldn't be able to go home again, she would be trapped in Asgard forever. She'd heard him shout _forgive me, Jane_ and known he was going to do it anyway. 

There was a gap in her memory; she couldn't remember seeing the hammer actually come down. There was only a splintering sound and then the dome sinking over the edge in a death's agony of exploding light. The ground beneath her feet had upended from the force of it. She'd been too close to the edge. 

Everything about the fall was fuzzy. She could only recall the light everywhere: light from the hammer's impact, light from the Bifrost curling all around her. That was the last thing she remembered, falling into space with the remains of the dying wormhole.

And now she was... somewhere. She pushed herself gingerly to her elbows. Her phone was lying in the dirt just a few inches away. It looked just like it always did. She reached out, turned it over. 4:15 PM, apparently. The date was the same. It had only been an hour since she'd left Earth. Something about that felt wrong. She dissolved into confusion, curled into an aching ball and closed her eyes. 

She had a feeling that when she got up and started looking around she wasn't going to like what she found. Rocks dug into her back. She clearly wasn't in an Asgardian hospital or any kind of hospital. But she was alive. When people fell into the vacuum of space, they didn't come out the other side alive. 

_Thor._

The thought sliced through her confusion. Despite all appearances, Thor had turned out to be telling the truth. If beautiful men could fall out of storms and end up being real-life aliens, there was no reason why surviving the vacuum of space couldn't be feasible after all. She'd been expanding her idea of what was scientifically possible quite a bit these past few days.

She opened her eyes again. Her mind sharpened and the landscape around her took shape. She was outdoors on a rocky slope under a sky full of brilliant stars. Wherever she was, it definitely wasn't four in the afternoon here. 

She pushed herself to all fours and then sat back on her heels. Her jeans were torn; a rock had shredded her knee. The whole left side of her body felt like it had been hit with a hammer. As soon as she looked up at the stars, she forgot the pain. 

Those were _not_ the constellations she knew. In fact, there were a lot more constellations – a lot more stars all together – than she was used to. 

She wasn't on Earth. But that was obvious. She'd been on Asgard. Was this still Asgard? Everything she'd seen of Thor's world was shiny and civilized-looking. Nothing like this deserted place of rock and dirt and stars. Still, she was breathing: there was air, though it felt a bit thin. Maybe Asgard had a moon. She wondered if Asgard's moon would be flat like the planet itself, a dessert dish orbiting a dinner plate, and stifled a despairing giggle. 

_Find Thor,_ she thought to herself. Thor was the guy who had made all this happen, Thor was probably the guy who could fix it. All she had to do was find Thor and get the hell out of here.

She staggered to her feet and ran her hands over the parts of her body that hurt. Bruising on her left side, but she didn't think any ribs were broken. Dried blood on her left knee and down her shin. It didn't make any sense. If she'd fallen from a height, she should've been pulverized. Not to mention – she took a deep breath – she hadn't suffocated in the vacuum. She shouldn't have survived longer than a minute unprotected in space. But there was nowhere to fall from, here, except space. 

A flash of light stopped her train of thought. It came from over the lip of the ridge where the slope ended. 

She waited. She was beginning to think she'd imagined it when another flash lit the sky. Now that she looked closer, there was a faint light just beyond the ridge. A steady light, underneath the flashes. 

"Hello?" she called. 

No answer. 

"Thor?"

She took a limping step up the slope, and then another. When she drew close to the top, she dropped to the ground again and crawled the rest of the way to peek over the edge. 

She was looking into the lip of an impact crater. The cause of the impact was obvious. A huge golden dome lay partially crushed and buried in the rock. The sight of it flooded her with relief. The Bifrost! Or at least part of it. Shreds of metal checkered the crater, turning it into a field of twisted gold and black. The steady light came from under the dome. 

The Bifrost. Yes. It had fallen over the edge, like she had. It was stupid, but she felt a bit less alone. And maybe if the bridge had landed with her, Thor had fallen, too. He might be somewhere nearby. Perhaps this _was_ a moon of Asgard and they hadn't fallen very far at all. 

A flash lit the sky again. An arm of light reached out of the crumpled dome and slammed into the ground. It stuck there like an arc of current, leaping, writhing, for a few seconds only. Long enough, though, for Jane to see a dark shape silhouetted inside. A _human_ shape, motionless in stark contrast to the living light. 

Not just light, she reminded herself. The wormhole was still active. The Bifrost was an Einstein-Rosen bridge generator and those flashes were Einstein-Rosen distortions. Perhaps she'd gotten caught in one when she fell into the void. That would explain why she hadn't suffocated in the vacuum – she'd been cocooned in a little pocket of Thor's rainbow bridge. And so, apparently, was someone else.

 _Thor._ Alive.

It seemed like the most ordinary thing in the world to climb over the edge of the crater and pick her way down into the impact site. She should be panicking. Or at least having an adrenaline rush. Instead she felt as cool as Bruce Willis doing his patented action hero swagger. _You wanna play it hard. Let's play it hard._ Everything made sense. She'd gone to space. Literally. She was on an alien planet. It was all OK. Thor was here and the bridge might even still be working and they could go home and if not, someone would find them. It even felt easier to breathe down here in the crater. 

She stopped a good distance away from the remains of the Bifrost and waited for the distortion to reoccur. When it did, she studied it. Same trajectory. Same grounding point. Same human figure inside. Frozen in time, like a fly in amber. 

Except it wasn't Thor. 

Sure, he wore a cape and armor, but it definitely wasn't Thor's build. He didn't have the goofy-looking helmet anymore, but she recognized him all the same. It was the brother. Thor had called him Loki. Jane had never spoken to him herself. 

Her bravado wavered. Everything was still OK, she told herself firmly. She sat back on her heels and rested an arm on a crooked ribbon of gold sticking out of the ground next to her. So. Alien planet, caped crusader in a fragment of wormhole. Though from what she knew of this Loki, he was less of a crusader and more of a... whoever the crusaders were always fighting. He'd wrecked Puento Antiguo trying to kill Thor and then tried to blow up another world for some obscure reason. The details were hazy. 

She looked around again. There was no one else in sight. No sign of Thor. Nothing at all, in fact. Just the remains of the Bifrost and Loki trapped in his amber and the rocks and the stars. For a moment, the strangeness of it made her dizzy. She clamped a mental lid on the feeling.

Should she try to get him out?

She sat for a long time, pondering the question. What if he tried to kill her? He'd tried to kill Thor. Then again, his giant robot hadn't paid the slightest attention to Jane herself. Did he even know who she was? Would he recognize her? If she helped him, would he help her? 

The Bifrost obviously wasn't entirely dead. Loki might know how to operate it. Maybe he could send them back to Asgard. Or maybe he would send himself back to Asgard and leave her here. Still... if she saw him operate the bridge, she might be able to do it herself. 

On the other hand, maybe he would kill her. 

She got up and limped back the way she'd come. She hadn't gotten very far when the air began to grow thin and she was forced to retreat, wheezing. A slow walk around the perimeter of the crater revealed that the same thing happened everywhere. There was a bubble of air – or a dome – centered on the Bifrost. It occurred to her that the bubble might not last forever. 

Next she clambered into the ruined Bifrost, flinching every time the distortion snaked its way out. It was a mess inside. She picked through the scraps, but she couldn't identify anything as controls, much less guess how to work the thing. Anxiety scratched at her ragged calm. 

She climbed out into the crater again. Loki was still there. He would probably stay there forever, stuck unconscious in the lightning, unless someone got him out. 

He might kill her, but she didn't know how long the air would last. The longer she waited, the less time he would have to fix the Bifrost after she freed him. And if he couldn't fix it... there was something to be said for not dying alone.

She found that her fingers had curled into claws on a fragment of twisted metal. Her heart was trying to beat its way out of her chest. Damn Thor, she should never have trusted him so much in the first place. Why following a crazy homeless man who called himself a Norse god into space had seemed like a good idea was beyond her at the moment. 

She counted the seconds between the appearances of the distortion. Then she counted them again. She must've counted them a hundred times before she managed to scrape together all her willpower. Next time. She would do it for sure the next time.

She waited, tensed into a painful crouch, until the first flicker appeared. Crushing any second thoughts, she launched herself into a flying tackle right at the heart of the distortion. 

Her shoulder connected with something solid, and then she hit the ground again just as awkwardly as the first time. She tried to scrabble away, but her legs were entangled with someone else's. She shouted in a sudden panic, and kicked, and tore herself free, scrambling a safe distance away before turning to take stock.

The sight of Loki's cape-swathed back greeted her. He was kneeling, one hand on the ground and the other to his head. She waited, but he didn't move.

"Um," she said, "hello? Are you...?" 

Alive? Conscious? Not feeling murder-y?

He didn't answer. 

"It's Loki, right?" 

Still nothing. She crept nearer, a tentative hand reaching for his shoulder. 

"Loki?"

He whirled before she could touch him, but his eyes looked through her. They were wild, fixed on something in the distance. He staggered to his feet and away, the green cape tangled ungracefully around his arm. 

Jane lingered where she was, at something of a loss. Well, that could've gone worse. At least he hadn't killed her. Yet. 

He had the air of a drugged man as he wandered across the crater. The stars burned on overhead. The space-time distortion flashed and he jumped and stared at it and seemed to notice his surroundings for the first time. Not murderous was good, but disoriented and unresponsive wasn't. The last of Jane's nerve was fraying. 

She trailed after him. "Loki!" she called. An edge of frustration colored the word. 

This time he heard. His eyes narrowed as he looked her up and down.

"What are you?" he said.

"My name's Jane Foster. I don't know if you really know who I am, but I came with Thor. To Asgard, I mean."

A spark of recognition lit his face before the spasm of some other emotion wiped it out. He barked a laugh.

"So he's cast you out as well." He made for the shell of the Bifrost.

"What?" Jane trotted to keep up. "What do you mean?"

"Thor!" Loki's voice echoed under the dome. 

Jane followed him, stepping around pieces of metal. The heart of the Bifrost still emitted its faint glow, the same pale color as the starlight. Loki untangled his cape from his arm and threw it to the ground with rather more force than was necessary. He approached the glowing center, one hand up as if to block the light despite its weakness. 

"He didn't cast me out. I fell when he broke the bridge. I'm sure he didn't mean for it to happen. He might have fallen himself. He might even be around here somewhere."

Loki's hands stilled. "Did you see my brother fall?"

"No, but if you and I did, it seems possible he did, too. Can you fix it? Can you get us back to Asgard?"

Loki moved again, cupping both hands over the light as if he was warming them by a fire. The glow reflected in his eyes when he looked at her.

"Us?" he said. 

"Well –" Jane stopped. Not too shrill. She tried to sound friendly and undemanding. "I freed you from the Einstein-Rosen distortion."

"My eternal thanks."

"So it seems only fair for you to return the favor. Especially since you're going back anyway."

Loki didn't answer. 

"You are going back, aren't you? To Asgard?"

Still nothing. Apparently she was beneath his notice. She tamped down her annoyance.

"Can I do anything to help? I know about Einstein-Rosen bridges."

"Like you helped Thor?" Loki said at last. He tore a strip of metal from the buckled floor with his bare hands and threw it away with a crash that made Jane flinch. The resulting hole revealed a dizzying network of wires and hoops, spheres and joints. 

"What?" she said.

The delicate metalwork warped under Loki's hands as if in a furnace, reshaping and forming new connections.

"Do you propose to help me as you helped Thor?" There was a pointed undertone to the words that she couldn't parse. 

"I didn't really do anything except take him out for some hash browns. This kind of stuff, though –" She squatted down by the hole, bringing her eye to eye with Loki, "– is more my speed. What are you doing?"

Loki's black look might as well have been a slap in the face. The mass of wires sparked and fizzed in a minor explosion that made him jerk his hands back. The look got even blacker, but it was directed at the machinery now. He thrust a hand deeper into the mechanism. 

That turned out to be the wrong thing to do.

Metal screamed deep inside the Bifrost's heart. The light blazed high, shooting a swarm of sparks out of the holes torn in the golden dome's skin. Jane flinched back, scrambling out of the ruins and ducking behind a large fragment of gold. Those weren't sparks, they were tiny bits of wormhole. No telling what would happen if one of them touched part of her. 

The shower of sparks reached high up towards the sky, but it lasted only a few seconds. When it snuffed out, the rest of the glow inside the Bifrost died with it, and the distortion that had trapped Loki. Sudden darkness descended: there was nothing more to see by than the stars. 

A shadow behind another scrap of gold stirred. 

"Did you break it?" Jane called. 

She wasn't really surprised that he didn't answer that one. He stalked towards the far edge of the crater, and again she ran after him. 

"The atmosphere stops a little ways outside the crater," she said. 

Her eyes were adjusting to the starlight. It was as bright as a full moon on Earth. She found Loki with his hands on the rim of the crater, gazing about as if there might be a convenient trapdoor back to Asgard somewhere. 

"I'm not sure how long our air will last."

Finally, he responded to the unspoken question. "The Bifrost generates it. To allow travelers to breathe even at the brink of the void."

"So you just broke our atmosphere as well as our way out of here?"

"If you prefer a quicker death than suffocation, I'll be happy to oblige."

Jane took an involuntary step back. He hadn't said it with venom, but it wasn't exactly a joke, either. The distracted air – almost disorientation – had returned to him. Even when he was threatening her, he hardly seemed to notice her.

"We could die out here," she said. It was getting harder not to sound shrill. "If they don't find us. Don't you care about that?"

He didn't bother to answer. He tilted his head back and looked up at the stars. 

"I don't know this world," he said, thoughtful and distant. 

"So what, do you know every planet in the galaxy?"

He shot her a contemptuous glance. "We're no longer in the Nine Realms."

The Nine Realms. Thor had talked about that. Some kind of community of worlds Earth was apparently a part of. It had seemed crazy then, but she had to admit it looked a lot more plausible now. But if they were no longer in the Nine Realms...

"Wait," she said. "Does that mean – can they still find us? How far away have we landed?"

The Bifrost had been active when it had plunged into space. Maybe they hadn't just fallen, but been transported very far away. Maybe her phone was wrong – she'd had it in her pocket, it would've been in the wormhole fragment with her – and it'd been more than an hour since she'd left Earth. It could be a hundred years, for all she knew. A million. Everyone she loved back home might be dead. 

Loki smiled at her. "Were you expecting a heroic rescue? From Thor, perhaps? Did you think he'd come striding across the stars for you? Do tell." His fingers dug into the rock, crushing it to gravel. "You'll never see your precious Thor again. He's forgotten you already. They all have. They're doubtless celebrating getting rid of you at last, all of them together!" The words blended into an incoherent snarl. He was staring through her again.

She backed away with jerky steps. That had come out of nowhere. He might look human on the outside, but there was something alien and angry underneath. 

"What is your deal, anyway?" she heard herself snap, but he had already turned away.

No longer in the Nine Realms. This was all a horrible nightmare; this was a mistake that should never have happened. A cold clamminess oozed up from under her skin. Was the air getting thinner already? She collapsed next to a boulder and put her head on her knees, balled her hands into fists to stop them shaking.

An image replayed itself over and over in her mind. Thor had said it was too dangerous to take her to Asgard, but she'd insisted. She'd seen what the Destroyer had done, but it hadn't sunk in, she hadn't cared about the danger. After a lifetime of just looking, she'd been so close to the stars that she couldn't think of anything except not letting this opportunity slip away. What if Thor didn't come back after all? So she'd begged and begged until there'd been a moment when the firm set of his mouth had softened and he'd broken into a smile. She had won and she'd been elated. 

If only she could go back and change that one moment. She could practically hear her own stupid, wheedling voice. If only she could change that one decision. The thought repeated on a loop: if only, if only, if only. She was too stuck in the spiral of panicky thoughts to notice time passing. It took a sudden awareness of light to snap her back to the present, to push back the overwhelming regret and make room again for fear of suffocation and animosity at Loki. She raised her head. 

The horizon beyond the crater's edge was brightening. Sunrise? Jane got to her feet. The thought of sunlight pushed back her swarming fear enough to clear her mind. 

But it wasn't the sun that rose over the barren landscape. It was a planet: huge, far closer than the Sun was to the Earth, and cloud-ridden, with swirls of gold and red. A gas giant. She _was_ on a moon. Not a flat thing, but a real moon, orbiting a real planet. A non-Earth planet. Rapt, Jane watched the disk of the planet soar higher over the horizon. A single long streak of white mingled with the red in the northern hemisphere. Sulfur and a bit of H2O in the atmosphere, probably. The color was almost hallucinatory compared to the gray and black all around her. She felt like a character in a black and white movie looking out into the Technicolor world of the audience. 

A noise distracted her from the planetrise. The crunch of feet on stone. Loki, too, was watching the planet. Well, it was certainly better than crushing rocks and raging at her. 

The sight of the planet revived her. She felt wrung out, mentally exhausted, but self-possessed again, at least. Still, she couldn't bring herself to talk to him. If she was going to die, she wanted to die admiring a beautiful planet and not getting yelled at by Loki. They remained in silence, some distance apart.

Her resolve lasted maybe a quarter of an hour. The planet's surface had absorbed her attention so thoroughly that she spotted the change right away: an unnatural dark blemish moving across its face. 

"Oh my god," she said. "What is _that_?"

It was shaped like a raptor's talon, a curved teardrop with the wide end up and the point hanging down. It was coming closer at a rapid pace. 

"Someone's taken note of us," Loki said, hostility forgotten. 

"Someone? Like people someone?"

Loki stepped back until he was in the center of the crater. A faint light shimmered around him, coalescing into a new cloak and a horn-topped helmet that added another foot to his already towering height. A gold-hafted spear appeared in his hand. Jane gaped. One more novelty to file away with everything else she'd seen today.

If that was a spaceship, it might be a rescue. She didn't plan to be left behind. In a moment Jane was at Loki's elbow, craning her neck back alongside him. 

"Aliens." The word slipped out of its own accord.

"Go away," Loki hissed.

"Away _where_?"

He didn't reply, and both of them stood unmoving, united in expectation.

The black claw grew and grew until it was right over them, the planet's light reflecting from its curves. It shone as smooth as a piece of the night sky itself, without detail or differentiation, until, when it had hung suspended in blackness above them for a long moment, lights flared all at once along the inner curve of the talon.

Jane gasped and shielded her eyes with a hand. White light flooded the whole of the crater. Her brain flipped through a gallery of alien abduction scenes from B-movies watched at two in the morning. 

"It's –"

"No doubt they're here to salvage," Loki said, more to himself than her. 

"You mean... they want the Bifrost?"

"They must have detected it. No one would ever have found us by chance."

"Maybe they'll give us a ride home." 

Loki's silence practically sneered. Well, a woman could hope. She thought she'd exhausted her adrenaline reserves, but excitement was coursing through her again.

A row of hatches opened on the outside edge of the talon and dropped a hail of pods into the air. An image remembered from some late-night documentary flashed through Jane's mind: a litter of tadpoles bursting out from cysts under a frog's skin, more than a little disturbing, making her back itch. It happened so quickly the pods had already landed before she could react.

They unrolled, curved plates of exoskeleton retracting.

They weren't pods. They were curled up... things. Their exoskeleton was black, with a greenish sheen; she had an impression of many coiling legs, a large furled tail, oddly pleasing spiral contours, and huge, wideset eyes on a flat head. They resembled giant, many-legged scorpions – as if scorpions didn't already have enough legs – except scorpions didn't usually fly around in spaceships so they clearly had a lot more going for them. There were at least twenty of the creatures. 

"I am Loki!" Loki called with easy confidence. He paused as if considering what else to say, his spear at a careless angle like a scepter. "What people are you?" 

If the aliens understood the greeting, they were unimpressed. The three closest uncurled their tails segment by segment in a smooth ripple. A sweet smell flooded Jane's senses. The tails were like a scorpion's, too, but more delicate, graceful, their impossibly fine-tipped stings floating from side to side. Side to side. Side to side. She blinked. _Side to side._

The swing of those savage points slammed into her brain like a physical attack. Fear burned through her entire nervous system: all she could see was the sting, all she could feel was the terrible sweetness creeping into her nose and down her throat. Self-control shattered and she screamed with the full force of her terrified lizard brain. She clung by instinct to the closest thing to safety she had – something bigger, stronger, and decidedly not scorpion-like – Loki. Her hands cramped into claws on his arm. He would do something! He'd blown up Puente Antiguo and fought Thor, he would tear these oversized insects to pieces.

Even through her consuming fear, the look on his face impressed itself into her consciousness. The whites of his eyes rolled in terror. His armor and helmet melted away. He convulsed away from her, stumbling over his own feet to crash in a heap to the ground.

"Loki!" she screamed, petrified, left to face the aliens alone. 

They swarmed in close, their claws tap-tapping on the rock, and their many legs reached for her.


	2. Chaotic Motion

A bead of sweat formed on Loki's temple. It was beneath his helm where no one could see. 

He sprawled on the throne. He could scrape together no sense of power from it. A thousand pairs of eyes watched him in silence, waiting for him to issue some pronouncement or command, but he grasped in vain for any memory of what it might be. They were all staring at him. Sardonic Sif, facile Fandral, haughty Hogun... he searched for Thor. Nothing. Thor had been banished. Nothing. 

He opened his mouth to speak, his tongue heavy as lead, but instead of words a chill breath of air puffed from his lips, and when he looked down at his hands, they were turning blue, frost forming patterns on the pure gold of the throne. The sweat on his temple froze. His icy fingers flew to his face to find ridges erupting from the skin – the eyes would be a glaring red, he knew – but he could not stir from his seat. The ice rippled over his legs and chest, _out_ of his legs and chest, holding him fast, crawling up over his arms and neck and face and into his mouth and still everyone watching, everyone could see what he was becoming. 

Fear beat behind his eyes and he fought to scream, his throat constricting. His body was transforming inside its chrysalis of ice. When the chrysalis ruptured, something new would squirm its way out. A shadow passed across the ice obscuring his sight. Was someone there? _Help me._ He lunged against the constraining ice one last time and the chrysalis shattered into a million shards of white. 

He was in the vault. He shook all over. His father lay dying before him; not sleeping, but blackened, frozen stiff under Loki's wondering blue hands. Odin's remaining eye was frosted over like a pail of water on a brisk winter's day, arrested forever in a moment of judgment and truth. 

Loki recoiled, spinning away; and when he turned he found the frost giants he had let into Asgard, waiting, beckoning to him. He threw his hands over his head, pressed them to his ears and squeezed his eyes shut. He ran into darkness, and fell in darkness. 

He was lying in bed and his mother leaned over him. When Frigga spoke, her voice sounded like someone else.

"Loki?" 

She reached out to stroke his hair. He cringed. 

"Don't touch me," he begged. "Their touch can shatter metal."

She frowned and shook her head and receded into the dark while he called after her not to leave him. 

Loki woke with a suddenness that launched his body into a crouch. It was dark in the waking world, too. The drumbeat of fear still sounded in his ears; he knew himself to be immeasurably far away from home and mother and father. He was lost, he was alone. In the inky black, the phantasmagoria of his dreams flickered before his eyes, fading bit by bit like an illustrated parchment burning into soot. He buried his head in his hands. 

It had all gone wrong. He had tried – he _had_ tried to keep things in order, to protect Asgard, but everything he touched revolted against him. Through no fault of his own! His father had melted away when he was most needed. His so-called friends and subjects had taken hardly a moment's thought before deciding to supplant him. And then Thor had interfered –

The thought of his brother summoned up such a maelstrom of hurt and fury and confusion that for a moment he could only feel, not think.

"You're awake."

The voice startled him. Someone else was here. He wrestled the maelstrom into submission with a swift and merciless stroke of will, and looked around him. 

He knelt on rusty metal. It wasn't wholly dark: a dim green glow provided enough light to see once his eyes knew to look. Water dripped somewhere close by. The air weighed on him, heavy with moisture, sticky under his unwieldy ceremonial armor. His immediate impression was one of decrepitude. 

Those creatures had taken him into their craft. He was inside the ship. 

The ceiling was low and rounded; in fact, the whole cell – for surely this must be a cell – gave the impression that it had just been blown, like a glass bubble, out of the rough black metal. The wall was damp under his fingers and the light came from tiny green veins threaded cobweb-like through the walls and ceiling. He might have believed the ship to be alive, a growing thing, if it hadn't been rusting.

He made a light, a white flame that floated unsupported in the air. The magic was among the earliest he'd learned as a child. Strange to see it here, looking just the same in this remote cell as it had in the halls of Asgard's palace at night. 

Some small distance away sat his fellow prisoner with her arms wrapped around her knees. He remembered now that the woman had fallen from the bridge with him. Thor had lost his toy; he must be grinding his teeth like a nursling dragon. What a pity Loki wasn't there to see it.

"What's this?" he said. "A lost lamb?"

"I could say the same about you."

She spoke to him in a peremptory way as if they were well-acquainted. Everything about her, it occurred to him now that he was taking note of her, was overly familiar and intrusive – her meddling with Thor, her presence here with him after his own people had scorned him ( _not your people_ , a sly stray thought). She was an interloper. 

"What are you _doing_ here?" He could not fathom how and why the fates had tossed him here into this scummy prison on the other side of the galaxy with, of all people, Thor's bauble of a day.

She stared. "Didn't you listen to anything I said?"

"Not if you were saying it longer than five minutes ago." 

He had a vague recollection of her running around after him, but it had been of no importance compared to his own concerns. His memory of landing was indistinct. The storm in his breast had overshadowed the external world; even now an undertow threatened to drag him back down and away from thoughts of this cell, of his freedom and his next moves. 

"I meant yesterday, on that moon." The woman's hands twisted against each other and she looked at him from the corner of her eye. "Are you OK?"

For the first time Loki looked at her closely. One trouser leg was torn and the skin beneath bruised and scabbed. She was tense and nervous, big-eyed like a frightened rabbit. But she didn't look like someone who'd just awoken from a sleep of nightmares.

"How long was I unconscious?" he asked.

"You weren't unconscious, exactly. You were hallucinating. For a long time. I fell asleep after a while and it's been a while since I woke up again."

He considered this, thinking back. 

"We were poisoned."

"Yeah, they... whatever they are... must have some kind of venom. Except it poisons your brain instead of your body."

He studied her, baffled, looking for some sign or explanation. "Why did it not affect you?"

She leaned forward, evidently pleased to be having a conversation. "It did! But only while they were actually spraying it. I calmed down again after they left us in here. The venom must have stayed in your system longer. I'm not a biologist, but maybe my metabolism is faster or there's something about your body chemistry..."

The stream of words stopped. His face, Loki realized, must be giving something away. Might she be lying? He prided himself on being able to tell when people were lying. She seemed sincere. How could a mortal woman withstand a weapon that an Asgardian could not?

Maybe, one of those sly stray thoughts said, an Asgardian _could_.

An ocean of fury heaved somewhere within him. He wanted to hurt someone. He could hurt this mortal who had outdone him. If he killed her, he would be alone like he ought to have been from the start. Was that what he wished? He was not sure, now, in this place, after these turns of fortune, what he wanted or what he might do.

"Maybe it's because of magic," she went on, oblivious to his furious thoughts. "Whatever magic really is. A technology so advanced people forgot that it's technology. Maybe the venom is a... spell? That affects other magic-users more than it does humans."

Clever, but wrong. Still, her suggestion gave him an idea. Loki knew who he could kill. 

"It's no magic," he said. "These creatures are mortal, and so are their weapons."

Their weapons, their ship, and their bodies. They'd put him in a cage thinking he was toothless. But these walls couldn't hold him. The ship couldn't hold him. This behemoth had swallowed a razor and it would have no idea until he was already cutting his way out. And since he had no knowledge of the hidden pathways between realms so far from his own Yggdrasil, a ship would certainly be of use. 

He stood up. The ceiling was low enough to make him stoop. He teetered, nearly unbalancing.

"The gravity is lower than Earth-normal," the woman said, and then added in a softer voice, "I can't believe I got to say that out loud."

Loki sorted through the thornfield of his memories for her name. _Forgive me, Jane_ , Thor had shouted as he'd broken the bridge and stranded her far from her own world. He'd said the words with a heavy ring of guilt, as if inconveniencing her actually mattered. He'd been unlike himself ever since he'd met this woman. 

Jane Foster, Loki remembered her telling him now.

"Jane Foster," he said. "Be quiet."

He splayed a hand against the damp ceiling. Where his skin touched the glowing green veins, it tingled. The little channels in the metal were filled with tiny living beings after all – parts of beings. Cells, but engineered to be more than that. If he listened long, he could hear their whispers: not true speech, but the imprint their miniscule wills made on reality. They were making the air on the ship, he realized, like an impossibly small forest.

It took no more than a moment of concentration and a twitch of his fingers to send one of the cells roving about the ship on his behalf. Now he had an eye peering about the guts of this vessel, and when it came back with the information it had gathered he would know exactly where to strike.

"What are you doing?" Jane Foster said.

"Breaking out," he replied. 

There was a silence. Then: "What's a jotun?"

He couldn't move; it was like being in the nightmare again. The little creatures under his fingers danced in agitation. But when he spoke, his voice remained cool.

"One of the people of the Nine Worlds. Frost giants. Why do you ask?"

"You kept saying that word while you were hallucinating."

The reply was too casual. She wanted him to ask what else he'd said in the throes of fear and madness. That meant he must have said something she found curious. 

He didn't ask. It didn't matter what she'd heard. He would leave her here and never see her again. He would escape, wreak havoc on those puny insects, and –

The thought ended in a blank. He tried again. He would take control of this ship. The remains of the Bifrost would be on board. He would repair it and go –

Go where? Had Odin awakened? Had he told everyone what Loki truly was? It would soothe their consciences, they would feel no guilt over deposing a frost giant. Harmony could reign in Asgard again with Loki safely expelled. No one would mourn him. Well, if they thought him dead, let him be dead to them. He would never return to Asgard to face their sneers. There was a universe out there beyond the Nine Realms and he could make his way where he chose. He would not miss them any more than they missed him. 

The return of his spy roused him from his thoughts. Jane Foster was standing at his shoulder. The tiny plant cell whispered where it had been, and a map of the ship took shape in his mind as he listened.

They were in the round back of the teardrop, in a warren of cells and passages near the engines. The area was disused, but from his spy's description he saw that the whole vessel was undermanned, in partial disrepair, filthy with dust and growth of tiny life. This was no military ship, nor a research vessel, and to his eye the technology appeared basic if not outright primitive. He caught a glimpse of huge bays crowded with smaller ships, weapons, equipment, other unknown things – scavengers, as he'd guessed. Nothing more than pirates. The tip of the upside-down teardrop housed the crew, such as they were. 

His prison was not, however, unguarded. There was a hatch in the ceiling, and in the passageway above, one of the scorpion-creatures kept watch.

Only one. They had no idea who they were dealing with. He smirked to himself. He could open the hatch with a word and tear it to pieces before anyone noticed a thing. The ship would belong to him within the hour. 

But the memory of the creatures' sting made him hesitate. If it stung him again, he might be out for another day. Defenseless. Perhaps they would find a better cell next time, or throw him out of the ship all together. Best to take care and break out right the first time. 

He looked down at Jane Foster. She was gazing up at him with anxious eyes.

"You're not going to leave me behind, right?" she said. "I mean, it really makes more sense if we stick together. You wouldn't just leave me here?" 

He smiled. "Certainly not! What do you take me for?"

His fingers found the invisible seams of the hatch. It had a simple mechanism. He unlocked it with another of the very first spells he'd ever learned. Child's play.

He extinguished the light.

"There's an empty corridor above," he said. "I'll hoist you up."

She was eager, probably still afraid he might jump out and leave her stranded in this pit. He watched her feet disappear up above and then waited, listening. 

Silence. A vague scuffling. Then a shriek, brief and chilling. He watched the hole. Silence again.

After a moment, he braced his fingers on the edge of the hatch and leaped softly out. 

There was no sweet scent in the air, and no Jane Foster raving or slumped on the ground as he'd expected. Instead, he saw a shuddering black mass that resolved itself in the dim light into two shapes locked together: Jane, her hands out of sight somewhere on the creature's underbelly, and the guard with some of its many legs clenching her and the others tapping urgently on the ground in what Loki heard with surprise were words: 

_to me to me to me to me to me!_

At his appearance, the creature's flat head turned and its tail snapped open. In two moves Loki conjured a knife and cut off its head. It went limp, its flailing legs sagging, and Jane wriggled out of its grip and leaned unsteadily against the wall. 

"A guard," she panted. "We should've guessed there would be a guard."

"I would've gone first, had I known," Loki said. "Are you hurt?"

The alien hadn't used its sting, but tried to subdue Jane with force first. Evidently the poison was kept in reserve. The creatures must have realized that Loki was the greater threat. Perhaps the sting could only be discharged once, or perhaps not every individual of the species had it in equal strength. Useful knowledge. 

"I'm OK, I'm OK," Jane said, straightening and breathing with greater ease. "What do we do now?"

The dead alien had been calling for help. Loki's spy had told him nothing about communications or surveillance systems. No telling if reinforcements were on the way, but best to move, in any case. He remembered from the rough map the cell had given him that there were command posts scattered throughout the ship. He should find one and make the vessel his before he saw to its crew. 

He looked at Jane Foster gazing up at him. She'd proved a convenient distraction, but she would get in the way in a fight. He considered slipping away and leaving her, but a strange reluctance held him back. He tried to unravel it. Curiosity: she had meant something to Thor, a fact so improbable it demanded explanation. Of course, Thor no longer mattered to Loki, Thor was no brother of his, but he could not shake off this curiosity. Then again, she might be useful. There was no sense wasting a tool, even a crude one. She posed no threat. 

Something more gnawed at him, creeping unwillingly into the light. The people of Midgard were the very image of Asgardians, though smaller, a pale reflection. If the rest of this corner of the galaxy resembled his captors, he might never see another person's face again, a _real_ person's, not a nest of insect eyes. She was born in the boughs of Yggdrasil, she had beheld the Realm Eternal. She was the last tie – no, he needed no ties, he was severing all ties – 

Loki's thoughts broke apart. The well of confusion and hurt in him threatened to overflow. Better not to think, not now. There was no plan now except to kill these vermin and take their ship. 

"Come on," he said. Jane Foster could tag along if she wished, it was of no consequence to him.

He veiled them both in invisibility, though with the dimness of the light he wasn't certain if sight was the aliens' main sense. 

The corridor wasn't very long, and neither were any of the ones branching off it. He threaded a path through a maze of tangled and uneven passages, tiny empty burrows and larger, equally empty chambers. The people who had built this ship moved in three dimensions, not two: at times the passages climbed or sloped at any angle, with notches cut out into all four walls. With the low gravity, it hardly took greater effort to go up than straight. To his irritation, this was a source of endless fascination to Jane, who swung up the vertical halls with altogether too much enthusiasm despite her injured leg. 

Everywhere the ship had an unkempt and disused look. He became more and more sure that the ship, like its cargo of salvaged wreckage, was stolen goods and no doubt ancient. By mortal standards.

Twice they passed crewmembers. The first time it was a lone creature rushing down one of the steeper passages, its multitude of legs clicking into the notches in the walls. Loki killed it before it could do more than register their presence, but in its death throes it dragged its legs along the wall in a long and penetrating rattle. 

Soon after, a group of four passed them. He pulled Jane into one of the empty chambers and they remained still, silent and unseen, as the searchers tapped and clattered by. One of them turned its head – seeking, scenting? – but they were not discovered. 

"Where are we going?" Jane whispered after they'd gone.

"Quiet." There was no one about now, but he was satisfied to find that she did just as he told her.

Shortly after, the corridor they were following took a sudden hard twist and opened out into a semi-circular space. A vast curved window pieced together out of a multitude of individual panes showed the field of the stars, brilliant but distorted. The command post. He took in its occupants at a glance: two of the aliens and a moving human shape – he couldn't understand how Jane Foster had got ahead of him – but he was already running for the nearest scorpion, conjuring a dagger. 

Lifeless obsidian eyes and smooth dark armor filled his vision. The creature _saw_ him somehow, he was sure of it, even though the nature of its seeing must be unusual to pierce through his veil. It reared back to face him. He scored it with the blade – its legs rattled and tapped in agony – then, like Jane had, sought the underbelly. Fighting in the low gravity was an unsteady matter and he labored to keep control of his movements. The blade sank in so deep that his hand went with it, disappearing into the entrails up to his forearm; and when he slashed upwards, they came spilling out in a yellow coil. 

A blow struck at his neck, the force of it vibrating through his body. If it had been Asgardian steel it would have inflicted a grievous wound, but the mortal weapon left not so much as a graze. He rounded on its wielder. To his surprise it was no scorpion, but a man-like figure, though surely no man – two arms, two legs, a head, yes; but instead of a face it had a mess of metallic tumors, and it skin was all armor. Man or machine or both, he was killing it before he could tell. 

This attacker had distracted him from the other scorpion. Too late, he saw the tail unfurl, the gleaming point of the sting rise. A spray of venom dusted the air. _Too slow,_ his thoughts screamed, he should've crushed this one first. Spurred by terror whipped to a chemical fever pitch, a reflex inside him kicked. 

Cold rippled over him. His breath turned to frost and he exhaled in a rush, blowing out an icy stream. The tiny droplets of venom froze in the air. It was only a partial defense, for a faint trace of sweetness lingered, and the shock of his body transforming against his will threw him off-balance. In a panic he leapt for the alien and tore its head half from its body with hands now jotun, now Asgardian, he couldn't be sure in the low light.

He fell to his hands and knees among the corpses. He shook his head, but it didn't clear; he had a feeling of falling into a bottomless hole, light and safety receding ever further away while he thrashed and scrabbled against nothing. Only the venom, he berated himself. It wasn't _real_ fear. But he couldn't get up.

A hand touched his shoulder. He almost tore it from its owner before he recognized Jane Foster. Her eyes were huge, enormous, and her voice came to him from far away.

"They're dead," she said. "You killed them all." 

In a too-real vision, he saw Asgard littered with bodies, frost giants marching along its shining boulevards. 

"No!" he said. "I'm not to blame! How was I to know? He never told me!"

She turned and walked away from him. He stumbled after, step after faltering step. He must not let the scorpion's sting drag him back down into darkness. If he kept his eyes on her, the dreams wouldn't come to haunt him. Jane Foster was real, of that he was sure; he would never hallucinate her. He clung to this idea, to her silhouette outlined against the broken stars. 

No sooner was the conviction formed than he was forced to doubt it. At the edge of the chamber below the viewing window a depression had been scooped out of the floor. It had an oval shape like a funeral boat. Jane sat down in it, speaking to him all the while in words he couldn't pick out of the general murmur of her voice. It was large, it swallowed her up like a fairy in a walnut shell. At each curving side of the boat curled three black claws. Perhaps it wasn't a funeral boat but an overturned dead beetle. Whatever it was, he didn't like it. He reached to pull Jane back out, but before he touched her the claws snapped shut, pinning her into the seat.

She gasped. Again he was overwhelmed by a feeling of unreality, of being in a dream. The claws hadn't closed over her but stabbed into her: the top two into her arms just above the wrists, the next set below her ribs, the last into her thighs. After the gasp she made no further sound. Her eyes were fixed on the stars outside and her mouth hung open in a helpless way. 

He pried at the claws. The smell of blood choked his senses. Blood was pooling in the bottom of the funeral boat. 

"Don't!" Jane's voice faded in as if from a great distance. "I can feel the ship! I can _feel_ it, Loki. I think I can fly it!" Her voice dropped to a raspy whisper and her face went pale, pale as death. Even her lips looked white. The pool of blood had spread, soaking her clothing. Her eyelids fluttered closed.

He yanked the claws from their sockets and pulled their points out of her flesh. This time she didn't protest or, in fact, say anything at all. He lifted her out of the depression and set her some distance away on the ground. Her head lolled against his shoulder and then limp as a doll's on the cold metal. 

"Jane Foster," he said. "Are you killed so easily?" Foolish of Thor to choose such a fragile being for his companion.

She was breathing, but clammy and bleeding excessively, especially from the wrists. The fear still working in him wove fantasies in his mind. He was afraid to be alone, afraid of being on this great ship in space with nothing but corpses around him, afraid that the bodies would move when he wasn't looking, fears worthy of a child. He fought against the fear. It was not as bad as the last time – he didn't _think_ he was hallucinating – but it was enough to make him stupid.

He couldn't remember how to stop bleeding. There must be a binding spell for it, to knit the flesh. He had no healing stone. He'd never been very skilled at healing; it came more naturally to Thor, and Loki had not been eager to be overshadowed by yet another talent of his favored brother. The human's skin was cool and white and marked with blood. He wrapped his hands around her arms above the wounds and squeezed to keep the blood from running out.

He must close the wounds. Healing eluded him, so he resorted to the magic of transformation he knew better. He could make magpies into snakes and clear sky into mist, why not new veins to patch the torn ones? But he needed life to create something living. 

In desperation, he dug his fingers into the ship's wall, breaking the network of filaments in the metal, and drew out some of the green fluid within. He transformed it, badly, into a thicker substance and plastered it over Jane's wounds. Concentrating through the heady fog of the venom, he pressed his fingertips into the mess of blood and cytoplasm and willed the edges together, like to like, willed the half-living matter to shape itself to the true living flesh. He could feel her pulse still, a small heart beating under his hands. She made no sound or movement. The hair that had fallen over her face did not stir under her shallow breaths. 

Hesitant at first but with increasing speed, connections too small to see formed; he sensed the fibers linking on an infinitesimal level. What he made was not quite new skin and not quite a bandage, but a shimmering webbing drawn so tight against the flesh as to close the gashes. He relaxed bit by bit, moving to the wounds on her sides and legs and closing them more quickly now that he knew what to do. When he took his hands away she no longer bled, but neither did she wake up. She lay like one of the corpses.

Loki became aware of the stillness. Nothing stirred except his pounding heart and his rushing breath. 

"Will you die?" he said aloud. 

He half-expected Thor to appear. Thor _ought_ to appear: one of his friends was in need. Thor had many failings, but missing an opportunity to be the hero wasn't one of them. If Jane Foster was hurt, shouldn't Thor come to rescue her? He almost convinced himself that he could see Thor just about to step out of the shadows, his chin raised with repulsive, reassuring confidence. 

Loki lurched to his feet. His head was clearing, the small dose of venom he'd received loosening its baleful hold. Thor was not coming, nor would anyone else see what he did here. At his feet lay three lives he had ended and one he had saved. They would not be entered in any reckoning of honor or dishonor. 

This thought recalled to him the purpose he'd resolved on: kill the crew, take their craft. The three slain before him were only the beginning; the rest of them lurked throughout the ship, tucked away in its crevices like the vermin they so well resembled. They knew he was loose and they likely knew by now that he'd taken one of their command posts. They would be rallying to destroy him before he could kill them, too. He had no time to linger.

It was a relief to return to this grim design. He had someone on whom to wreak his wrongs. They were practically begging him to do so. This time he would be more cautious and not a one of them would come close enough to use its sting.

Jane Foster didn't stir when he turned his back on her and strode back into the twisting maze where his enemies dwelt. He did not look back. He clung to the ember of anger he had stoked in himself, nursing it into a flame. As he ran he formed around him a guard of illusions: other Lokis, identical to him in every respect except for their lack of speech, his perfect brothers in appearance and intention. He could trust them to take the scorpions' poison for him, to move exactly as he directed them, and never would they betray him as a real brother could. He was Loki, no longer of Asgard, and those who had crossed him would feel his wrath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains: violence, blood


	3. Accretion

Jane drifted. She'd fallen to a great depth and she was coming up again through layer after layer of water. At first the dark and cold pressed close all around her. This pressure diminished bit by bit; warmer currents brushed her with gentle fingers. A faint light filtered through the black. It brightened and brightened until she could see individual sunbeams shooting in burnished streaks through the sea. It had grown warm; specks of sea life floated at her side, surfacing with her. A sunbeam shone on her face, making her want to squint. It intensified to almost blinding as she flew upwards. She pinched her eyes shut.

When she opened them she was awake. Through a canopy like a black and white mosaic she saw the stars above her, but not her own stars, the stars she'd memorized on Earth. They were too bright and there were too many of them. This time there was no slow retrieval of memory. She knew where she was and how she'd gotten here. She must be near the galactic center. The solar system – the Sol system, she supposed, more impersonally – was located in an arm of the Milky Way where the stars were sparser. It was 25,000 lightyears from the Sol system to the center of the Milky Way, if this was even still part of the Milky Way and not some other galaxy altogether. 

Her arms hurt with a dull ache. She lifted them and stared, uncomprehending, at the stretch of greenish semi-translucent skin covering her forearms and wrists. It looked like she was part amphibian. 

She turned with excruciating slowness onto her side, getting her elbow beneath her. She couldn't push herself up more than six inches and when she did, she wished she hadn't. Not ten feet away lay a dead body. It was the human-shaped one. Its back twisted at an unnatural angle, its head facing her and its hips the opposite direction. It was too dim to see the alien's face, which should have been a relief, but really just made her imagine the body watching her in the dark, blinking wetly and working its mandibles or its mouth-gears or whatever it had. 

"Loki!" she called in a cracking whisper. He wasn't here. He'd left her with the dead. Maybe he'd assumed _she_ was dead. She was all alone, one tiny naked ape trillions of miles from home, and she was in pain, and she had no way out, and she didn't know what to do. Her head sank back down to the ground. Her last thought was one of defiance: she wasn't just an animal. She was Jane Foster, a scientist, the first person to travel further from Earth than the Moon.

The next time she woke, there were lights. Four white flames hung in the air. She'd been placed on her back, and when she looked around, she saw that the bodies were no longer there. 

Loki was standing nearby with his back to her. From this angle, he was a towering form blocking the bright stars. He was taking off his armor. When he removed a piece – she had no idea what they were called – it floated as if it was hanging from an invisible hook. The armor was golden and still shiny, incongruously shiny in this scuffed and dirty place. He must have thought so too; he passed his hands over what she assumed was the breastplate and the material rippled, turning a black that resembled the scorpion-creatures' exoskeleton in its hue and sheen. It was a lot less pretty, but she thought when he put it on again he would fit right in here. Which was more than she could say for herself.

"You didn't leave me behind," she croaked.

His back stilled. He had an undercoat on beneath the armor. It looked like soft leather. She had a sudden embarrassing urge to bury her face in it. God, she needed a hug badly if she was fantasizing about hugging Loki. 

"There's water to your left," he said.

She found a flask on the ground beside her. It took her whole strength to unscrew the cap and lift it to her lips. The water tasted incredible, and as she swallowed sip after sip she wondered where it came from. Had Loki found it or had he made it somehow? Was it really delicious space water or was it just flavored by thirst? She hadn't realized how dry her throat was; she felt like a desert soaking up scant rainfall. 

"What did you do to me?" she asked when she could speak normally again. It wasn't quite what she'd intended to say, but stringing words together was difficult at the moment.

Loki snorted. " _Do_ to you? I saved your life. If you would've preferred to die, I'll spare myself the effort next time."

"No, no, I mean," – she held up her arms – "What _is_ it? Am I turning into _The Fly_?" The stuff on her arms had a gauzy appearance, like insect wings. She decided to think of them as dragonfly rather than housefly. It was better for her peace of mind. 

Loki gave her a doubtful look. "You must have lost more blood than I believed. Humans have no power to change form, Jane Foster. Unless there's something unusual about yourself that you haven't told me?" He raised his eyebrows quizzically. 

She almost choked on a laugh and felt dizzy. "OK, I'm not becoming a human fly. So these...?" She ran her fingers over the growth on her skin. 

"Are bandages."

"Wow." The stuff looked like it was growing right out of her skin. "Did you... make these? With magic?"

"Are they not up to Midgardian standard? What would one of your healers have done – amputate?"

She had to fight not to laugh again. She must be giddy from blood loss, or from not dying. Even though she was crumpled like a limp rag on the dirty floor of an insect-ridden spacecraft stranded vast distances from home, she felt buoyant. Compared to the day or two she'd spent in that cell with no idea if she would ever get out again, alone except for a raving Loki who for all she knew might've snapped and killed her any moment, this was the presidential suite at a five-star hotel. At least there was light and water and someone who seemed to care whether she lived or died. Why Loki had decided she was worth saving, she didn't know, but it was a definite improvement on his attitude before they'd been captured. 

She sat up, prompting another wave of dizziness. Nothing hurt this time, though. The bandages felt tight and dry, but there was no pain in her arms, sides, or legs. She knew there should be, because she remembered how much it had hurt when the jaws of that pod thing had snapped shut on her. She'd seen one of the aliens using it – without any distress that she could tell – before it went to attack Loki. She'd thought she could try to replicate whatever it was doing. If this was a ship, there must be a way to fly it. And for a moment, she had; she'd been flying, she'd _been_ the ship, she'd been everywhere, she'd felt the starlight on her skin. Then nothing but pain and darkness. Maybe the system could tell that she wasn't the designated driver.

"You should eat something," Loki said. He'd finished with the armor, but he didn't put it on again. It stayed lined up on its invisible coat rack: a chest thingy, some arm thingies, a belty thing, a strap with other straps... and people said scientific instruments were complicated. 

He disappeared into one of the passages that opened onto this... bridge or control room, she guessed. When he came back, his hands were full of something. He put the something down in front of her and sat down, watching her expectantly with his hands dangling over his knees.

The something was a pile of white objects like oversized grains of rice. They were as long as her hand and plain, unmarked. 

"What... is that?"

"I found them in one of the chambers further inside. It looked to be filled with supplies. These are organic."

Jane picked one up. It felt lukewarm to the touch. "Organic, huh? Have you tried them?"

"No."

"What? How come I have to be the human guinea pig?"

"You're the one who's hungry."

She was starving. Considering how much blood she'd lost, she should be eating a giant steak right now. This was not steak, and might be poisonous. 

"Well, you're the one with the superhuman powers. Something that's deadly to me might do nothing except give you a stomachache."

"Not necessarily. Remember the venom."

He said it in a rather clipped tone. She wondered if this was revenge for not being as affected by the venom as he was. Eating a random object Loki had found in the spaceship wasn't appealing, but she was reluctant to say no. She didn't want to make him angry again. And she would have to eat eventually anyway, and if there was nothing else around...

Well, she was a scientist, experimenting with new things was her job. These weren't exactly controlled laboratory conditions, but... She took a small bite of one of the white ovals. She held it in her mouth without swallowing for a moment. There was no stinging, burning, or bitter flavor; the taste resembled chamomile, mild and inoffensive. She swallowed it down and decided to wait a while to see if there was any adverse reaction. 

"Is that it?" Loki said.

"I just want to wait and make sure my stomach doesn't turn inside out or something." His interest struck her as odd. "What do you care, anyway?"

"I'm merely concerned for your welfare," he said in an arch tone, like he thought it was funny. "After all the trouble I took to keep you alive, it would be a shame if you keeled over from starvation."

She stared at the rubbery surface of the thing she'd just taken a bite of. "So why did you? Take the trouble, I mean. You didn't seem too interested in being friends back on that moon." 

"Do you think me so cold-blooded that I would stand by and do nothing while you perished?"

He'd destroyed most of Puente Antiguo to get at Thor without any regard to the people who lived there. That sounded like textbook cold-blooded to her. On the other hand, he _had_ stopped her from bleeding to death and given her water and food, such as it was. She traced her fingertips over the seam where her skin became something else. Maybe he'd come to the same conclusion she had: they could die out here, and there was no one else either of them could turn to for help. Or maybe not. Answering her question with another question didn't indicate that he was terribly willing to discuss his reasons. 

"How long was I out?" she asked, picking a more neutral topic. "Did you meet any more of the – crew?"

"You were unconscious for nearly a day." The second question took more time to answer. "The... crew are hiding from me. I've no doubt they'll rally against me eventually. For now they've withdrawn from this part of the ship. This is an old wreck, full of nooks and crannies, and they are of a kind that prefers a stab in the dark to fair battle."

"You went looking for them?" Not for a friendly talk, it was safe to assume. After the way he'd reacted to the venom, that seemed reckless. She tried to decide if it was brave-reckless or crazy-reckless. 

He mistook the statement as a criticism. "They're our captors. They captured _me_ , of the royal blood of Asgard. Most likely they hoped to sell us as slaves or curiosities. They merit no quarter." 

"I didn't mean..." She searched for a way to smooth over the conversation. "This must be one hell of a change for you. Going from a prince of a place like Asgard to here. I guess I can't blame you for being angry."

He examined her in silence and she was afraid that had been the wrong thing to say, but when he spoke his answer was unexpected. 

"I was no prince. I was king of Asgard."

"I – hadn't realized that. Thor said your dad was the king. Odin." Each word felt like a step in the dark on shifting sand. Thor didn't seem like the kind of person who would lie; but then, she'd only known him for a few days. She knew so little about either of them. 

"Oh, Thor is no liar," Loki said, as if following her thoughts. "Our father has ruled Asgard for thousands of your years. But he is old, and often grows ill of late. When Thor was banished, the shock nearly killed him, and he fell into the Odinsleep. As the next in line, I became king by right. My mother passed the All-Father's scepter, Gungnir, on to me with her own hands."

She remembered a scepter – or a spear, she'd thought – from Thor and Loki's fight on the bridge. Thor hadn't said anything about a brother at all until the robot had shown up. Only that he was the god of thunder, his powers had been taken away, and he'd been banished to Earth via Einstein-Rosen bridge. Considering how much that was to take in, maybe it wasn't so surprising that he hadn't told her more. And he'd seemed caught off-guard by the attack on Puente Antiguo. 

That was really the crux of the issue. How could she trust someone who had tried to kill his brother, who had attacked a whole town full of innocent people? But she thought he must want her to trust him. Why else bring up being king and his father's sickness and the scepter? Why bother justifying himself to her if he didn't care about her opinion? She didn't think she stood a chance of making it home by herself. He _had_ broken her out of that cell with him and then saved her life. 

She was going to ask. It was probably dangerous ground, but she needed to know. "Why did you attack my town?"

He looked away, his jaw tightening. His hair had come unslicked, curling slightly around his ears. She couldn't imagine him as any kind of king; he looked like a boy. Like someone who'd bitten off more than he could chew and made a mess of it. Which, come to think of it, was what she had done. Maybe that was why it was the two of them here and not Thor. 

"You judge me for that," he said, "knowing nothing of my reasons. Very well, you shall know them. Despite my brother's banishment, a group of warriors sworn to him decided they would prefer him as king rather than me. They disobeyed my – _and_ the All-Father's – commands and travelled to Midgard to retrieve Thor. Make no mistake, that was an act of treason. The punishment is death, and as king it was my place to exact it. That is why I sent the Destroyer. It was not directed at your people." 

"That doesn't mean it didn't hurt any of us."

"I may have been overzealous. You must understand that mortal lives seem of little import to us in Asgard. My brother and I have fought for our father's favor for centuries, while countless empires have risen and crumbled away on Midgard. War among the gods can have dire consequences for the lowly. As for Jotunheim – " though she hadn't asked, "– Asgard has waged war against that vicious folk since both our realms were formed. We even protected your world from them. This was but the latest skirmish."

As answers went, it was callous and arrogant, but not irrational. That was pretty much how mythological figures behaved, not to mention historical kings and queens on Earth. Everything for a bit of power. She didn't think Thor had been committing treason, but if Loki thought he had been, that explained a lot. Nothing Loki had said contradicted what Thor had told her, and none of it was crazy on the face of it. 

She needed him not to be crazy. She needed him to be, if not a hero, if not in the right, at least something less than a senseless killer. If he'd wanted to lie, he could've made his story sound a lot more favorable. The fact that he came off as kind of a dick even in his own version was reassuring. 

"That sounds like a terrible way to grow up," she said by way of peace offering.

"Pardon?"

"With your dad making the two of you compete for his favor. Seems kind of awful." She tried not to wince at how awkward that sounded. Hopefully he wouldn't think she was making fun of him. "Not to insult your dad or anything. I'm sure he's a great king. Or not, if he isn't. ... I'm just trying to be nice."

Loki was staring at her dubiously. "Thank you. I think."

A wave of exhaustion swamped her. She must be anemic; Loki's magic might have patched her up, but it hadn't replaced the blood she'd lost. She still had the weird food thing in her hand. The piece she'd eaten didn't seem to have done her any harm.

"Well, here goes," she said. She took a bite and tried to repress the suspicion that she was eating somebody's larva. It was no different from eating an egg. Eggs were basically bird larvae. 

She'd eaten the whole thing and started on a second one when Loki took one from the pile, magicked it into what looked like a jam tart, and downed it one mouthful.

She coughed. "Are you kidding me? You let me eat that when you could've turned it into a pizza at any time?"

His face was innocent. "You only seemed concerned about poison, not the flavor."

"You –" She narrowed her eyes. "You were disappointed earlier when I didn't eat it right away. You've been waiting this whole conversation to punk me!"

"It was tedious watching you sleep. I had to occupy my mind with something."

She recalled dimly that Loki had been the Norse trickster god. That was all well and good, but – she leaned over and gripped his undercoat in one shaking fist. "Don't joke about food. We're in space. Everything is slime and insects and deadly technology. Do not. Joke. About the food."

She held out one of the larvae. Loki shrugged and transformed it into, not a pizza, but something with bread and cheese and meat, anyway. 

"Thank you," she said. She was almost falling asleep again already. "And thank you for..."

He quirked an eyebrow. 

"For not leaving me behind. For not letting me die. Thank you."

He inclined his head. "I'm well rewarded by the pleasure of your company."

The words jarred; she didn't like the way he'd said them, a little too smoothly. It made her nervous, though she couldn't have said why. He'd done nothing but help her since they'd broken out of the cell. 

"So what are we going to do?" she said to cover her reaction. "How far do you think we are from Asgard?"

Loki finished another jam tart. "You said you could fly this ship."

"I –" She was sure she hadn't imagined it. She hadn't just flown the ship, she'd been the ship. "I think I could, but maybe not without it killing me."

"What if I ensured that it didn't kill you?"

"You mean I get in the pod and you use magic to make sure I don't bleed out?" That was a whole new level of trust. "Are you sure you can actually do that?"

"I'm sure I can think of something better than those bandages."

There was a part of Jane that jumped at the idea of flying a spaceship, even with the threat of severe wounding. There was, however, also a sensible part. 

"Have you tried flying it yourself?"

"Naturally. See for yourself."

She twisted to look behind her. There had been three pods. One was a mess; she could see her own blood still spattered over the tips of the claws. But the second one, too, had been destroyed, disassembled into a series of components. 

"The interface is designed to link with the pilot's nervous system by piercing the exoskeleton. One assumes it doesn't cause injury to the species it's intended for. Unfortunately, the material is far too brittle to break Asgardian skin. That means only you can fly the ship."

She looked back at him. He'd spoken with perfect calm; his face was an open book, unlined, his eyes clear as water. Nothing about him pinged her as suspicious. Still, a chill ran through her. Had all this polite conversation, the food, the story about treason in Asgard and Loki the inexperienced, hot-headed accidental king, been calculated to win her trust so she would fly the ship for him? It wasn't like he could force her; if she linked with the vessel's systems, she'd be in control of where they went. It was an incentive to be her friend. But what would happen if she stopped being useful?

She didn't want it to be fake. She didn't want to be alone out here, alone and lost and without anyone on her side. Even a slippery character like Loki was better than that. And maybe this was all her imagination and she was doing him an injustice. 

In any case, there was no reason at all to let him realize she had doubts. If he was only keeping her around to be useful, she would have to make sure she didn't stop being useful. 

"I've always wanted to fly a spaceship," she said brightly. "When do we start?"

***

She was, in fact, far too weak to try out the pods again in the immediate future. She half-expected Loki to push her to make the attempt sooner, but he just nodded when she told him she would need to recover, and she felt guilty for her suspicions, but not relieved of them.

The first problem was her clothing. Her whole back was blood-stained from her hair down to her heels. It had dried stiff. She didn't think it was salvageable, and there wasn't much prospect of finding a t-shirt and jeans around here. The aliens must have something – the humanoid one Loki had killed must have been wearing clothing, she would've noticed if it was stark naked. 

After eating, she'd fallen into a long, exhausted doze. When she woke, Loki was gone again, like the first time she'd come around. This time she knew he was coming back, and she intended to make use of his absence. 

She had to wait for a moment outside the control room for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, her heart thumping with impatience. Then she headed – down, figuring that down must be further into the ship. 

Food, sleep, and the low gravity gave her more energy than she'd expected. She must have climbed down ten or twelve levels, meeting no one, seeing nothing except the slimy glowing walls and openings to rooms and other passages. None of the rooms had anything in them, except one that was covered with a thin layer of sand. She let it run through her fingers, wondering what on Earth this ship had been for and why it was so empty. 

Another two levels down, everything changed. The floor evened out into a broad white-walled hallway and, best of all, there was _light_ , soft, diffuse light that changed color from gold to orange to blue to green. Door-less recesses lined the hallway, some of them empty, but most packed with _things_. She wandered along, her mouth hanging open. Most of it looked like equipment. Some of it might be armor or weaponry. She stopped by a recess with a row of water tanks set into its back wall. 

One of them had an arm in it.

"Whoa." She touched the glass front of the tank and it slid out of the wall in total silence. She jerked back. It looked like a human arm, but coated with silver; she might have thought it was robotic, but she could see the bone of the elbow joint inside. Of the other tanks, some were empty and some had other body parts or unidentifiable pieces of metal in them. It might have been a mad scientist's laboratory. Too bad she was a regular scientist and not a mad one; she had no idea what it was all for. Research? Spare parts? Maybe it was an art exhibit. 

The next recess contained equipment and, finally, she recognized a few things: batteries – they were transparent, she could see the electrolyte inside – a Helmholtz coil, and something she guessed was a laser scalpel and, sure enough, turned on like a pen with a tiny lightsaber at the end when she found the button. Maybe not an art exhibit, but an infirmary. There was a medical air about the place, though she didn't see any beds or patients. 

She found clothing in another recess, hanging neatly from a pole like in an ordinary wardrobe. If you could call it clothing... whoever lived here had a collection of leather mini-skirts and an inordinate fondness for scoop necks. The tops came with armbands and torques adorned with spikes on the _inside_. Maybe not an infirmary, but an S &M club. 

At the end of the rack she found something more palatable: loose black leggings that were soft as cashmere. She took a pair, along with one of the scoop necks that wasn't quite so scooped that she would literally spill out of it, plus the laser scalpel. 

The thought of going back to the control room and changing with Loki potentially appearing at any moment made her nervous. Staying out here by herself for longer than necessary also made her nervous. The rock warred with the hard place until she decided that she wanted to rest anyway before climbing back, and that at least she had lots of water here. 

She opened one of the tanks that didn't have a body part in it and stuck a corner of her t-shirt in. It didn't melt, dissolve, or burst into flame, and when she dipped her fingers in after, it felt just like ordinary water. She took off her shirt and dunked the clean section into the tank, using it to scrub the dried blood from as much of her back as she reach, her skin prickling all the while. She hoped she wasn't giving some weird creature watching on a surveillance camera a show. Maybe the mad scientist who came with the laboratory. She was reaching for the clasp of her bra – ruined beyond what any hurried wash with cold water could fix – when she heard a footstep. 

She flattened herself against the wall of the recess with the fluidity of instinct, which proved to be pointless when the alien walked right by her. It was a humanoid one. She gaped at it, frozen, feeling, of all things, like she'd been caught stealing instead of terrified for her life. It paid no attention to her, its head turning neither left nor right, every footfall slow and halting. It walked right past as if she was invisible. 

After the initial shock, she found that she wasn't afraid. She was burning with curiosity. It was the reckless part of her that gave Erik those headaches, the part she always heard his voice chiding her for in her head. _Promise me you won't do what you're thinking about doing,_ the voice was saying now. _Just don't move. Stay hidden. Maybe it's like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, it can only see motion._

She curled her hands around the edge of the recess and stuck her head out to peek at the alien as it went by. It still didn't notice her. 

It had a matte silver skin like the body parts in the tanks, metal encircling all its joints, and bright green fur like moss covering its head, neck, and most of its face. It wandered like a sleepwalker, veering off a straight line and back, once bumping into the wall. When the light turned to golden she thought it tilted its head up a bit, but it was hard to tell from the back. She watched until it disappeared around a corner. 

Only once her visitor had vanished did she feel afraid. That was typical, too. Once the excitement was over, the smart part of her woke up again to scold the reckless part. The silence was eerie now, and the changing lights too bright. She finished her hurried bath, doing the best she could with her matted hair, and climbed slowly back up to the control room to chew over what she'd witnessed. Perhaps the aliens couldn't see? Or it had literally been sleepwalking? Maybe it just didn't care about her. She had five different hypotheses by the time she made it back, but none of them sounded convincing even to her. 

She dropped off to asleep the moment she hit the ground, and when she woke, Loki was back. She expected him to say something about her exploring, but he didn't, then or on the following days; but the next time she ventured out into the rest of the ship when he was gone, she couldn't find the brightly lit hallway again, or anything except corridors that led her in circles right back to the control room. She tried marking her way with actual breadcrumbs from their food and found that it took about ten minutes to cross her own path. 

She was sure Loki was doing it somehow – _he_ didn't have any problem leaving – but she didn't complain. Accusing him of passive-aggressively holding her prisoner would upset the tentative truce they'd made, and there was nothing she could do to back up a protest. He must be worried she would run off before she recovered enough to try piloting the ship, though god knew where he thought she was planning to go.

The knowing silence gnawed at her. She almost wished Loki would snap at her again instead of this uneasy civility. She grew more certain every day that they weren't really _friends_ : this was about not losing his passkey to the ship. And wherever he planned to have her fly it, she doubted the direction would be towards Earth. He evaded every question about his plans, just as cagey about the future as he was about the past when she asked him about Asgard. She tried drawing him out about magic instead, and on that subject, at least, he spoke a surprising amount, though the more she learned, the more daunting reconciling magic with science appeared.

She had to fill the tense hours between sleeping with something, so she spent them trying to learn more about the ship and examining the stars through the window. After a few days, an idea occurred to her and she began counting the number of stars in each segment of the window. By comparing the density of background stars in a strip across the width of the window, she could orient herself: to her left when she came into the control room, the stars grew denser, so that direction must be the galactic center. When the density distribution changed over days, she knew that the ship was still moving. Either they were drifting, or this wasn't the only control center and the ship's crew was steering them somewhere. 

She didn't know how much time had passed, but she had grown stronger, and the artificial skin Loki had made her had been peeling off for days, leaving her pink and unmarked underneath, when Loki brought home one of the aliens.

He dragged it in and threw it to the ground by the pods. 

"What are you doing?" Jane said, scrambling to her feet in alarm. 

"Have no fear. I've pulled its sting."

The end of the creature's tail had been torn off. It whipped the stump back and forth and drummed its legs in a way Jane could only interpret to mean it was in pain. 

"Why did you bring it here?"

"To ask it questions. Are you familiar with the systems on this vessel?"

For a confused moment, she thought he was talking to her and opened her mouth to answer _of course I'm not._ Then she realized he was addressing the alien. 

Its legs scrabbled on the floor. 

"You may wish to reconsider that," Loki said with an unpleasant smile. 

Only when the alien tapped its legs again did Jane grasp that it was answering. 

"Haven't you seen enough already?" Loki asked. A slight wrinkle appeared on his nose. "Poor choice of words. Do you even see?"

"You can understand that?" Jane demanded. "When did you learn their language?" Was _that_ what he'd been doing while he was gone? 

It was worse than that. 

"I speak every tongue and every sentient being understands mine," Loki said shortly. "We call it the Allspeak. It's an ability shared by all gods."

She was so bowled over she didn't even hear the next thing he said to the alien. It just wasn't fair. Like Loki didn't already have enough advantages. Somehow, as she watched the alien give its answer in whatever infinitely complex version of Morse code it used, she didn't think she'd be able to learn their language anytime soon. She would have to depend on Loki to communicate, with no idea of how accurate the information he was passing on might be. 

"Nothing so elaborate," Loki said, not to her.

"What's it saying?" she asked. 

"Various threats and the like. They're little more than bandits, and not very imaginative."

He grabbed one of the alien's legs by the joint and tore it out of its socket. A stringy rope of connective tissue dangled from the resulting hole in the exoskeleton. The creature made no sound – it must not have anything like a larynx – but its body language was eloquent. The fact that its suffering took place in silence made it, if anything, more horrible to watch. 

"You didn't have to do that," Jane said. Her voice sounded feeble, sick.

"Feeling sorry for our would-be captors, Jane? A soft heart will do you no good. They are pirates and slavers. The rest of this quadrant would thank me for stamping them out."

"That doesn't mean you have to torture them!"

The look he shot her brimmed with contradictory expressions: a callow, defensive hurt, the anger he always seemed to have bubbling beneath the surface, and a raw plea for – she didn't know what.

"You needn't sneer, Mistress Disdain. Everything I do is to your gain as well. Do you wish to remain trapped here until your short life snuffs out?"

"Loki –"

Loki hushed her by holding up a hand. In the harsh light of the ever-burning torches, the lines of his face had become cold and stark, cut from unfeeling marble. He gazed down at the creature's convulsions, intent on his dreadful questioning.

"What's it saying now?" she whispered. 

He listened a moment longer and gave a dismissive laugh. "It says we've sealed our own fate. It says this is a cursed ship and we're welcome to it. Such language! You mustn't complain when it is your own greed that has brought your doom. I told you my name when your people captured me, and now I tell it to you again: know that your end came at the hands of Loki."

He curled his fingers around another of the alien's legs. Jane cringed, but no torture followed. The creature burst into a barrage of tapping and Loki, with a satisfied look, eased his grip. 

"Much better," he said. "Show me how and you can depart with the rest of you intact."

The alien heaved itself to its remaining feet. Its mangled tail and the end of its abdomen dragged on the floor. The tap of its legs sounded like rain just beginning: hesitant, irregular. 

It went to the one undamaged pod and matched six of its healthy legs to the six claws. Where Jane had had to lie awkwardly on the bottom of the pod, the alien stood, its torso of a height with the claws. Deep grooves in its lower limbs slotted into matching grooves in the machinery. In one quick motion, it twisted all six legs at the same time, rearranging the intricate design. A light flashed once from around the rim of the pod. 

"It claims the interface can be refashioned to fit a human body," Loki said. "I suppose we should find out if it's telling the truth."

Its task accomplished, the alien dragged itself step by arduous step out of the pod and towards the way out. Loki barred its way with one long leg. 

"Not yet. Let's see if your vaunted contraption works as you say it does. Jane?"

"What, you mean now?"

"Have no fear. If the device kills you, I'll crush this insect to avenge your death."

She'd spent enough time around Loki to recognize his idea of a joke. "Yeah, very funny. If the pod kills me, you'll be stranded out here without a pilot. Just focus on that fact."

She got in the pod before he could make any retort. Her hands were shaking. At that moment she barely remembered the fact that she'd also wanted to fly the ship. This must be what the cow going to the slaughter felt like; he'd spent the last few weeks fattening her up with cordiality and lectures about magic and now he wanted to collect on his investment. If she refused, she'd probably end up missing an arm or a leg like the alien he'd captured. 

The claws looked different. Instead of a curve tapering to a sharp tip at the end, they had a cluster of needles. 

"I don't think this is a good id–"

The claws snapped down. Just like the last time, her whole world exploded.

She felt the pain of the needles sinking into her flesh from a remote distance. This was because the sting affected only a tiny part of her: she had grown vast, she had become untouchable. Her mind met the ship's slow, rudimentary mind, and her proprioception doubled and split in two. She felt what the ship felt. 

It had a name: it was called, in another language, the _Unsatisfied_. Its people were not aliens or creatures, but the _Rukba_ and, more recently, the _Chitauri_ , who were not called _it_ but, in most cases, _she_. The _Unsatisfied_ had existed without quite living for two hundred years. In its youth it had housed the Rukba soldiery; once it had lagged behind the latest technological standard, prisoners of many species had taken their place. It had been purchased by an eccentric collector and finally stolen by the marauders who now operated it. 

"Jane."

The sound of her name snapped her own identity into focus. She wasn't a two-hundred-year-old alien spaceship, she was Jane Foster from the distant planet called Earth. After a second of panic, she could feel her own body again. Loki was bending over her, cool hands cradling her face. 

"It's working!" she gasped out. 

She had spent a lifetime studying space from afar. Now she was closer to the stars than any human had ever been. Nothing separated her from the universe outside. With the ship's senses she could see the whole electromagnetic spectrum, colors humans had never known or named. She could feel the interstellar medium brushing, diaphanous as the finest cobweb, along the _Unsatisfied_ 's skin. A nearby star pulsed with a rhythm like a lullaby.

"Where are we? What region of the galaxy?" Loki asked. 

She let her consciousness expand. The _Unsatisfied_ was drifting in the uninhabited corridor of space between Rukbar and Sanctuary. It had travelled much farther in its two centuries, and she strained to see what it knew, searching for a place called Earth or Midgard or Terra or Sol but finding only a litany of unfamiliar names: beyond Sanctuary, harsh words like _Xandar_ and _Kree_ , _Krylor_ and _Zunda_. 

"Sanctuary," she said. "We were in Sanctuary, but we're moving away. There's a –"

She could barely make it out, not because it was small, but because it had made itself difficult to see. A stealth technology of some kind.

"There's a ship on the edge of Sanctuary. It's huge, much bigger than we are. We're heading away from it."

"Can you turn us around?"

She tried to move, to steer, willed the ship to change velocity the way she would will her own limbs to run when she was tired. She thought it was working; the _Unsatisfied_ responded, slowing in preparation for reversal. She had no time to celebrate her success, for as soon as the ship decelerated, a hammer blow struck her brain.

"Someone else is here!" she screamed. 

There _were_ other control centers, and another mind was using one, muscling her out with far greater experience and skill than her own. Her attention jumped from the outside to the inside of the ship, seeking the threat: she saw the empty rooms, the decaying passages, the holds strewn with engines and hull plates and laser cannons and sonic shields, small cruisers and larger cargo transports and the skeletal hulk of the Bifrost, the crew of no more than twenty and, she realized with a jolt, they had been forty before Loki came on board, so that was where he went, she fought not to lose control but the other pilot was much better at this–

Her connection to the _Unsatisfied_ broke. She blinked in the sudden smallness of her surroundings. Loki had pulled her out of the pod, holding her upright by her shoulders. The stars were outside again.

"Still alive, Jane Foster?"

Pain flared where the needles had pierced her, but not very much, and she wasn't bleeding in any dangerous amount. She had other worries. 

"There's another pilot," she said. "One of the crew. They blocked me when I tried to control the ship."

His hands drifted away and he sat back on his heels. "Then I'll have to remove them. I trust you have no objection?"

If he'd already killed half the crew, she doubted anything she said would prevent him from killing the other half. More than that, she didn't want him to know that the _Unsatisfied_ had revealed information to her besides their location. He might start to wonder what else she'd learned. Which would be awkward because, in the brief flash of the ship's interior before she'd been ejected from the system, she'd found out something valuable indeed. 

The Bifrost wasn't defunct. A spark of life remained inside its battered shell. Did Loki know? She wasn't about to ask. Reticent as he'd been, she'd become convinced he had no intention of returning to Asgard, much less Earth. As long as he needed her to be his pilot, he wouldn't let her go, either. She would have to figure out how to work the bridge herself before he caught on. And that meant she had to get out of this room before anything else. 

"Only that you have to take me with you," she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains: severed body parts, brief torture, needles


	4. Ignition

"This wasn't quite what I meant," Jane Foster muttered. 

"You'll have to take any complaints to our hosts," Loki replied. "They've made it exceedingly difficult to reach them by more straightforward means."

They were standing next to an airlock. He'd almost reconsidered his plan when he saw its shabby state, scored with rust, the small porthole obscured by a layer of grime. On inspection, however, the seal looked tight enough. 

He was glad of it. Over the course of a fortnight he'd destroyed all but one of the other command posts. That one the crew had barricaded against him, not only closing doorways but blocking up and sealing shut whole passages. They'd dug themselves in for a siege. With time, he could doubtless find a way through, but he'd no interest in wasting days rooting out a few miscreants. This way he could remove the obstacle quickly and be on his way to... whatever came next. Besides, it meant Jane couldn't follow him. He wondered what had caused the change of heart; she'd been less than eager to see harm done to the alien he'd captured. Perhaps the psychic attack on her through the ship had dampened those qualms.

"Not afraid of the dark, I hope?" he said.

"If I were, astrophysicist would've been a pretty bad choice of career."

She was annoyed with him. He found it funny. She was easy, in general, to provoke with even mild tricks. Easier than Thor, who didn't always notice when a trick had been played on him. He tried to imagine, for the thousandth time, how it had been between them, what she had done to him; tried to picture the two of them, Thor and Jane Foster side by side, to picture the mighty Thor looking at Jane with regard, or even deigning to notice her at all. He wanted to see where the spark had been struck, but he'd not yet found the flint in her.

The inner door of the airlock hissed open. He had other matters to think about. He stepped inside. 

"Don't wander off," he said. 

"Wander off to where?" She folded her arms.

Still pretending she hadn't done just that at the first opportunity. Perhaps what had brought his brother and this woman together was their shared lack of common sense when it came to self-preservation. Using a maze of illusion to stop her from slipping out and getting herself killed had seemed easier than arguing. Now, though, he'd so decimated the aliens and they'd withdrawn so far into their holes that there was next to no danger in any case. 

The airlock's inner door rolled closed and the atmosphere began to siphon out into the void. Jane's small face frowned at him through the porthole, smeared and distorted by the glass. Probably worrying again that he would leave her behind. It was almost touching the way she clung to him. 

The outer door opened and he sought a handhold. This airlock was too small for docking with vessels; it must be for repair work, and that meant there should be a way to climb out. His fingers found a line of evenly spaced pockets in the hull. He could picture the many-legged ones fitting their claws inside. Not as ideal as a ladder, but enough for him to manage. 

Outside, the absence of sound impacted his ears so that the silence almost had weight. In the vacuum, he stopped breathing, and the lack of even this, the sound of his own breath, made his own mind feel a quieter place. He hadn't slept since Jane Foster had woken him out of the long fall he'd believed, with his last thoughts amidst the radiance and fury of the Bifrost's destruction, would be his death. Whenever he closed his eyes, the images his memory showed him were more terrible by far than this dark corner of the universe he'd been cast into: not only those from the last days in Asgard, but from long before, from a past that now seemed half a dream and wholly a lie. Here in the silence of space, he might have been able to rest; but even for him, that would be perilous, and besides, he had enemies and could not slacken his vigilance. 

The ship's had looked smooth from a distance, but up close it had texture: seams where the plates had been joined, ridges under which must run wires and conduits, dents and edges left over from countless battles. Even after the pockets stopped, he had no difficulty finding purchase. He was careful still, for he had no illusions that Jane Foster would throw him a lifeline if he lost his hold, unless she had more ingenuity than she appeared to. 

The command post he sought was located over the curve of the hull, on its far side. He climbed in the direction that, inside the ship, would have been up; but here where the artificial gravity dropped off to nothing, only the faintest pull tied him to the surface beneath his hands, and he weighed no more than a thought, all his remaining burdens intangible ones. 

Up ahead loomed the top of the curve. A line bisected it at its apex. When he came closer he saw that the line was no part of the vessel: it was the border between shadow and light, between the dark side of the ship and a side illuminated by a nearby star. Without atmosphere to scatter the fall of light, the shadow's edge was sharp as a razor, so black and thin that when he crossed over it a superstitious part of him tensed as if he might cut himself. He clambered out into the light side where every detail of the hull, every scratch and pockmark ground by interstellar dust, had an eye-watering clarity. 

The star wasn't close – far smaller than Asgard's own sun in its sky – but it was a bright one, its blue-white light heatless but bleaching the depth out of everything around him. Transfixed by its glare, he felt for a moment dimensionless as well as soundless and weightless, a part of this stark world untouched by emotion or desire, with no identity of his own. He was uncertain why he was here; not only here on the outside of the craft, but here at all in this distant abyss, here in the universe, here in his own body and his own life. The luminous eye of the uncaring star saw nothing, and under it he seemed to become nothing. 

He might have hung there for any amount of time, but he was growing cold, the heat radiating seeping out of him. It wasn't that he feared the cold; even the profoundest deep freeze could not kill him. But he feared the transformation cold might bring about him, feared to see his skin turn blue without his leave in this unforgiving light. 

He climbed on, his immediate purpose returning with motion. He clung to it as he clung to the handholds beneath him. The rival command post was near. He was moving down, in the opposite direction from before, but it felt no different, as if he was crawling around and around on an endless sphere. 

He came to the viewing windows and peered inside into the ordinary world of life and sound, though from his perspective it was a silent theater of spotlit figures. There were seven in the room below him. Not the whole lot still living, then, but no matter. His aim was to destroy their pilot's pods; any he slew would be an afterthought. 

He knocked on the window. It made no sound out here, but they would be able to hear it inside, and in fact the four insect-shaped ones turned their shallow heads up to stare at him. His shadow lay black on them like a spider's. He pressed his hand flat against the glass and grinned wolfishly. Probably they couldn't see well enough to tell, much less interpret his expression, but it satisfied his private sense of amusement. 

A flurry of activity followed below. He pounded on the glass. Made to defy centuries of battle and space debris, it didn't crack even under his strength. It made no difference; any mortal construction could be undone by magic. Into the fine structure of the glass, he sent a spell, coaxing the infinitesimal flaws in each thick pane to change their nature, transfiguring them into tiny beads of water; the barest hint, a trace so slight it turned to frost in an instant in the cold of space. All through the beautiful ancient glass his insidious web of frost branched, sapping its strength, weakening it until it ceased to withstand the air pressure from within and shattered outwards in a silent burst of shards. The air came with it, gone into the vacuum in a heartbeat. 

Loki watched, fascinated, as the creatures below tried to escape from the room before they succumbed to the lack of atmosphere. They had evidently welded shut the doorways with heavy slabs of scrap metal in their effort to keep him out. Their protection had become their tomb. Unbarricading and unwelding the passages proved too great a task in the minutes left to them. 

He waited until all movement had stopped. He leaped down to meet his own shadow, crisp in the undiluted light. His feet made no sound when he landed, or when he stepped around the bodies to the pilot's pods. He destroyed each of them with a careful thoroughness, tearing out all six claws and driving the pointed ends into the bottom of each depression to mangle whatever machinery was hidden there. That was the last of them; only his own command post remained. Barring a few wretches left to mop up, the craft was truly his.

He didn't bother to tear down the barricade, but returned the way he had come. When he arrived back at the airlock, Jane Foster was no longer there. 

Once he was inside where sound existed again, he called her name, perplexed. When there was no reply, he returned to the command room. Perhaps she'd become afraid of the dark after all. He stood at a loss among the scant signs of habitation. She hadn't had time to familiarize herself with the ship. Had she truly gone wandering about to explore _now_?

He thought it more likely that she'd been captured and felt as if something had been stolen from him. Whatever might happen to Jane Foster, by rights Loki should be the one to decide it. This woman had spun Thor's head around until he came home a wilting, soft-hearted fool instead of the belligerent fool he'd been before. Loki would hold her to account for that one way or another.

He began a methodical search. He'd combed the ship for an hour with growing impatience when he heard speech. It wasn't Jane's voice, but the language of the scorpions.

"Kill her," it said.

He had arrived in one of the cargo holds where the pirates stored their scavenged oddments. These areas were better-kept than the rest, no doubt because they contained items that might be of actual value. This one appeared less promising in that respect, as there was not much in it: a shuttlecraft with part of its hull missing and its engine guts strewn about the floor, a framework of golden three-dimensional hexagons rising and curving in a half-canopy to the ceiling. 

His quarry had gathered under the canopy next to the open hole in the shuttle's flank. There were eleven of them, and they had Jane. A tall human-shaped one held her by the upper arms. Loki slipped into the lee of one of the legs of the golden framework, veiling himself as deeply as he knew how. The aliens saw a different realm of light than most of the peoples of the Nine Realms; he'd had to adjust his spellwork to match, and it was not quite perfect yet, but it would do.

The small crowd was not, as he'd thought at first, discussing Jane. They were staring into the small craft at something he could not see from this angle. 

"Kill her," a scorpion tapped. "You know how it will end."

A humanoid one replied. Loki had not heard their speech before. If the scorpions' language of taps and raps was eccentric, this was so foreign he could not understand it all despite the Allspeak. Along the line of its collarbone the alien had a dense array of lights that flashed in a variety of rhythms and colors. The machinery must be connected to its mind – each member of this species that Loki had encountered had parts of metal as well as of flesh. The speech was rudimentary, like someone speaking their third or fourth tongue, and he had the sense that there was another layer of meaning under it, expressed in some other medium that the Allspeak could not perceive.

 _Is only small_ , the humanoid one said. _Do not kill. Enough dead._

"You're the most soft-shelled Chitauri I've ever met. She isn't even one of yours!"

_Unit now here. Unit diminishes._

From inside the shuttle came a rustling and then a desperate plea. "It's only a speck! It might go away."

"You ought to thank me," the one in favor of killing said. "The others would run away and leave you to the slow death. I will give you mercy."

 _Not mercy if unwilling_ , the one called a Chitauri blinked. 

"A mercy to the rest of us," someone else said.

Jane didn't struggle, but she was stealing furtive glances around the corners of the hold. No doubt she expected him to rescue her any moment. How funny that he'd become the knight in shining armor to Thor's lost pet. It wasn't quite what he'd had in mind when he'd promised to pay her a visit. 

He shied away from the memory of those words and of Thor's look of distaste. Nothing he'd said under the Bifrost's dome had been unjust, yet he was not satisfied; he'd said it all wrong, he'd meant to speak with a lofty chill in his voice, not with tears. Thor should've been humbled by how much Loki had outdone him by his own standards, not spurred to oppose him.

With an internal snarl, he forced his thoughts away from the familiar track. His new spellwork could do with a trial. He sidled out of the shadow of the canopy, his steps as silent as he could make them, until he stood next to the Chitauri who held Jane, a hidden thirteenth member of the little circle. A black spark of that waywardness that had led his fellows to name him mischief kindled in his heart, and the fitful anger stirred by memory fanned it. The Chitauri, he thought, did not have the sharpest hearing; but then again, he was very close. It would be a precarious matter.

He leaned down and said in the softest whisper, barely more than a breath, "You do get into trouble, don't you?"

Jane gave a violent start, drawing the attention of their captors from the shuttle back to her. An assortment of eyes searched for him. He would give them something to look at. 

In an instant he had a blade through the peaceable Chitauri's soft heart. It lurched forward, bringing Jane crashing to the ground with it. The others scattered into the dark in a clatter of footsteps, save for the bold one who had a passion for mercy-killing. It snatched Jane from under its dead comrade and pressed the sharp tip of its claw to her throat. Its tail flicked back and forth, seeking a target.

"I can kill your mate faster than you can kill me," it said. 

Loki laughed aloud. The sting swung to follow the sound, but already he had spun away, leaving behind an illusion with his form, partly visible as if its cloak of magic were peeling away. In the same motion he drew a long blue blade from the air and sliced off the alien's tail and, half a second later, five of its legs. It dropped Jane, reeling and scuttling away, but Loki didn't bother to follow its retreat. He might have hunted them all down, but he was afire with curiosity about what was in the shuttle.

"I can't leave you alone for a moment, can I?" he said airily to Jane, who was extricating herself with a shudder from the would-be hostage-taker's limbs. He wondered how the aliens had known to come for her just when he was away, but the thought was driven from his mind by a wail, or rather a screech as of claws on metal, from the shuttle. 

"Who's there? _What's happening?_ "

He stepped closer. The interior was as battered as the exterior, half the far wall of instrumentation ripped out and the other half dark, unpowered and dusty. Though the aliens had spoken of only one person, there were two shapes inside, blacker patches in the gloom. He lit a flame and hung it in the air above his head. One shape was a scorpion, chained by four of its legs to the gridwork floor. The other was a Chitauri, standing with its face to the wall and its back to him, unmoving. Something in its posture sent a shiver through him. He leaned in through the gap in the hull to see better; the scorpion, recognizing him, scuttled away as far as its chains would allow, an incomprehensible chattering eliciting from its legs.

Jane's hand on his shoulder arrested him. 

"Don't," she said.

He would've laughed at her presumption, but her tone had a note of sincerity that stilled his tongue. She was wide-eyed.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Look." She came to stand behind his shoulder as if she feared to face the aliens without a barrier. She pointed at the motionless Chitauri. An emerald-green pelt covered its whole head and back; its face had been swallowed up beyond recognition. The stuff had an oily appearance, a slight glisten as of sweat or something else seeping up from underneath. One of the Chitauri's limbs jerked spasmodically. 

"I've seen that one before," Jane said. "When I went out into the ship."

"On your little foray?"

He was surprised she'd admitted to it at last. She'd said not a word about the maze he'd created to keep her from wandering out from under his eye. He'd wondered whether that was out of pride or submissiveness. 

"I was just curious," she said. "But I saw that one. The green stuff wasn't so advanced. It's grown twice as much since then. And look at that one." She meant the scorpion. "It's been... infected."

The chained alien had a spot of the moss-like substance at the junction of its head and thorax. 

"I think it's dangerous. Don't touch it," Jane finished. 

He'd no need to be told, for his eyes could see what Jane's could not. Neither on the moon where they'd crashed nor anywhere on this vessel had he encountered any trace of beings like himself. Everything here was mortal, weak and corruptible, the technology limited by the clumsiness of all attempts to manipulate the physical world that did not rely on magic. Here at last had surfaced a thing of sorcery, and such a sorcery as he had never seen in all his centuries of study, resembling nothing in Yggdrasil; and he was fascinated. 

Under the surface, a plant-like structure the author of the magic must have chosen as the substrate for his creation, an aspect of reality had been twisted. He could not tell how it had been done. The work was so minute he wasn't even certain he was interpreting it right. But he could feel the damage and the loss as clearly as his eyes would have seen a black patch in the sky at high noon. The Chitauri's mind had been punctured and its consciousness had trickled away, slowly, he thought, drop by drop, the will that animated every living creature evanescing into nothing. The magic had destroyed its mind from the foundations up. 

"You're quite right," he said. "It is dangerous." Whoever had made this was dangerous, and he was certain it had been _made_ , created for some purpose. 

His interest in this place where he'd been so unwillingly cast sharpened, and for the first time, he felt a pull towards the future instead of the past. Out of the chaos of his moods and impulses at last crystallized a purpose. 

Beyond the narrow confines of this ship there existed a world inhabited by magic, an arena where he might become a player. There could be something worthwhile here for him yet; and as soon as he thought this, he was impatient with the present and eager to replace it with somewhere less brooding and dark, where he could obliterate the ghost of Asgard's betrayed second son and fashion himself anew. And maybe, with magic like the people who had created this marvelous spell – or rather _curse_ , a curse with the power to rot the very mind – even the past might not be beyond salvaging. 

He found some plates of scrap metal on the cargo hold's floor and covered the hole in the shuttle's wall with them, joining the edges together with a burst of heat. The still conscious alien inside made a sound he perceived through Allspeak as a sort of moaning. It wasn't much, but it would do; the scorpion was chained down, and the Chitauri nothing but a walking husk. He could study the magic later at his leisure. For now, he wished to crack open his new world. 

"You know what it is?" Jane Foster asked. She'd taken a step back to watch his activity. 

"I know that it's deadly."

"Are you just walling them in there?"

He paused to gesture innocently at the small hole that still remained. "Do you care to lend them company in their final hours?"

She retreated further. "If it's a pathogen, we could be infected already."

He finished walling up the gap. He thought he would be able to tell if the magic roiling within that creeping growth jumped to a new victim. How it spread, however, he had no idea: by touch, by air, by random chance, or did it seek a particular kind of host? He would have to find out for his own protection. 

"We're not," he said. "Trust me." He could've laughed again at her dubious expression. "I've destroyed the other pods. Nothing should prevent you from flying the ship now." He took her arm and pulled her with him. 

"What are you planning to do?" she said, hanging back. 

He stopped. The flame he'd left by the shuttle still burned, throwing enough light to see her by. Her voice, a bit breathless, had a trace of an echo under the curved ceiling. He thought she looked afraid. 

"After we contact that other ship," she said, "what are you going to do? In the long-term. Are we staying here?" She always said _we_ and _us_ , but without conviction. _What are you going to do with me?_ , she may as well have asked. The answer to both was whatever he pleased. 

"Jane Foster," he said, "perhaps we should make our unspoken agreement a spoken one. Fly this ship for me and I'll not abandon you to die alone in a distant corner of the universe. But I've no intention of limping back home to Asgard just yet. Is it a bargain?"

"I thought you'd say that." After a moment she said, with a catch in her voice, "Deal. Are you going to give your word, too?"

He frowned. "Too?"

"Thor did." She said each word distinctly, like a challenge; or perhaps he was imagining it. 

"Whatever Thor did, I'll do the contrary." 

He didn't wish to think about Thor. The mention of his brother's name tarnished his new determination, and the casualness with which she'd found him wanting in comparison was like a thorn digging under his skin. All the way back he was nagged by the idea of Jane Foster measuring him against Thor. He crushed the thought until its very dust cowered. 

So this was the seed of his new empire: an ancient pirate hulk and one troublesome mortal. 

It was only once Jane was in the pilot's pod, her eyes looking through him to gaze at the distant stars, that it occurred to him the words might have been a purposeful jab, a tiny rebellion against his refusal to return to Asgard. He stood above her, watching the needles of the pod's interface shoot dark tendrils alongside the veins of her forearms. The pointed tips had torn holes through the cloth covering her ribs and legs, and he could see drops of blood beading on the pale skin where it was untouched by sun. Cradled in the machine's embrace, her hair fanning out like a halo and her eyes rapt in something half stupor and half ecstasy, she had a grotesque beauty, not at all in Thor's style. If Thor could see her now, he might forget his little dalliance. It gave Loki a certain pleasure to think that something Thor had liked was being twisted, _transformed_. 

"I think – I think they've seen us," Jane gasped. 

He crouched by her side. Pinned like a butterfly, she was as vulnerable as one, too; a touch of his hand could crush her bright wings and she could do nothing, not even run. He rested his fingertips on her cheek and turned her head to face him. Her eyes focused and then unfocused. 

"Can you send them a message?" he said. 

"Maybe. Maybe, yeah. I think I can send a... What should I say?"

"Tell them I wish to speak with them in person."

He watched the unguarded expressions flicker over her face. With her mind inhabiting the ship, she hardly knew what her body was doing. 

"I think they understood! ... I did it. I can actually do this!" She grinned at the ceiling in triumph, elated. 

Loki set his palm on the hollow of her breastbone. He could feel her fast mortal heart. 

"Did my brother bed you?" he said. 

Her expression was like a wall collapsing, from joy into outrage. 

"What is the _matter_ with you?" She tried to wrench away, but his hand held her in place with ease. He would pry out a piece of his mystery now, when she had no defenses. 

"What did Thor give you his word to do? Stay by your side forever? Bring you back to live among the gods?" How far indeed had she turned his brother's head?

"To stop smashing coffee mugs!"

He came up short. "Truly?" Thor had given his word for something so trivial? Thor had agreed not to smash things? 

Her gaze had sharpened, lucid and present. "You're insane. And you have some serious issues about your brother. God, I should've become an accountant instead."

"Probably," he agreed. "You never answered my question."

A shadow passed over their heads. The vacant look returned to Jane's eyes. Above, the stars vanished as the window filled with the dark shape of the other ship, a hub with four petals like a huge metallic flower unfolding to shield them from the cold cosmos. It was larger by far than his own. A next stepping stone, perhaps. 

"What do you care?" Jane said, grinding out each word with a terrible effort. 

Four figures materialized in pool of light cast by one of his floating torches. One of them stepped ahead of the others and he saw the flame through its semi-transparent body. They had sent crude projections, not come in person. A wise choice, all told. He forced back the pod's claws and pulled Jane out of the hollow. 

"Whatever Thor did, I'll do the contrary," he said. 

She had no chance to retort. He guessed by her stunned look that the answer to his question was no. A roundabout trick, but effective. He brought her with him as he strode towards their visitors, weaving an illusion of his golden armor and helm about him. She didn't resist, and he thought with glee that she seemed dazed. He'd unsettled her. He hoped the feeling festered in her heart. 

All four of them were Chitauri, but these were no outlaws. They were large and armed with sleek rifles, and they moved in a coordinated way that suggested confidence and training. They spoke the same soundless and broken tongue as the one he'd killed, but all four at once instead of by turns. 

_Do not enter Sanctuary._

Loki spread his hands. "Is this the welcome of the Chitauri people? I'd hoped for a warmer one."

Without much in the way of faces, they were difficult to read, but their response bore an undercurrent of surprise.

_What planet? Xandarian? Name?_

"I am Loki," he said. "I come from Yggdrasil."

_Unknown. The other?_

"My pilot," he said. "Also of Yggdrasil."

"They're asking about me?" Jane said. "What are they saying?"

He didn't reply, for the Chitauri had spoken over her; they could understand his speech, but not hers.

 _Unknown. Identification: Chitauri mothership, soldier caste, Tangent Hive, unit 14b. Loki of Yggdrasil and pilot, do not enter Sanctuary. This ship is contaminated. This ship will be destroyed._

"You mean that delightful bit of enchantment in my hold?" He had an inkling. He could distinguish the outline of an opportunity, like a crack in a closed door into which he could wedge his fingers. "Is it your creation?"

 _No_ , they said, as he'd expected. _Not Chitauri. The slow death. Bane of Chitauri._

"I thought as much. And who devised it to be the bane of the Chitauri?"

But though the row of lights on the Chitauri's armor flashed at a furious speed, the Allspeak could make no sense of their answer. _Death_ was the only concept he could make out. Death and that they wished to raze his new possession until nothing remained except sterile stardust. From what he'd seen, that would do little good. No amount of plasma would unravel magic of that caliber. But the desperation and futility implied by the act were telling, as was the size of the ship patrolling their space to enforce the quarantine. They knew this magic well; it had ravaged them long; and they had no idea how to destroy it.

"I offer you a better bargain," he said, gambling on his conclusions. "Your every attempt to cure the slow death has met with failure, has it not? How many have perished? A race of mortals stands no chance against devastation wrought by magic. Your people must be truly desperate. But it just so happens that I am a sorcerer of great skill. I will rid you of this bane, in return for a fitting price."

Silence, as far as the Allspeak was concerned. Yet they must be conferring somehow. A telepathic race? 

_Not credible,_ they said at last after a long moment. 

"You wish some proof? Then look."

The trick was so simple he was almost sorry for them. Jane had been watching this, to her, one-sided exchange with anxious eyes. He took her by the shoulders and pushed her in front of him, and then drew aside her hair. She shied away, but froze in the middle of the movement. From her ear down her neck and over her collarbone ran a long strip of the slow death, as the Chitauri called it, like a malignant growth of mold. 

As one, the Chitauri drew back. They had only sent projections of themselves and still they drew back. The fear of this affliction must be as ingrained as instinct. Jane gaped in surprise and he was glad the aliens were unfamiliar with facial expressions or they would surely suspect something amiss. 

"Is that –?" she burst out.

"Be still," he murmured. Then he said, in a louder tone, "As you see, my pilot has been contaminated. But this is no death sentence." He passed his hand over the green strip, unraveling the illusion, and it vanished. "I can find a cure for the Chitauri victims as well. Imagine the reign of the slow death at an end once and for all."

If the appearance of the Chitauri's bane had agitated them, its disappearance astonished them into complete paralysis. It took far longer for them to speak this time, and again he had the sense that a silent conference was taking place. 

Jane, meanwhile, had divined his ploy and was sending him an accusing glare. "We just learned about this stuff today! You're giving them false hope."

The disadvantage of Allspeak was that the Chitauri would understand his answer. He'd no wish to upset his negotiations at this delicate moment. 

"Of course, I would never have let any harm come to you," he said benevolently, making her glare all the harder. 

"If only I could believe you meant that for real."

"Your faith in me is truly my most cherished treasure." 

Before they could continue their mismatched converation, the Chitauri stepped forward in tandem. All four of them pointed together at the ship visible through the window. 

_Come._

The door was open. "With pleasure," Loki said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains: suffocation in vacuum, brain-eating magic fungus, Loki creepin'


End file.
